Email Glenn and ask for the mailing address and instructions: GGreenwald@salon.com

I did that long before I asked you....I still haven't heard from him.

I'll try again.

Maybe he doesn't want my money.

I'm not a lobbyist. :-)

H.R. 2454 is weak and will prove to ineffective:

WASHINGTON, D.C., United States — In advance of tomorrow’s vote on the American Clean Energy and Security Act in the House of Representatives, Greenpeace USA Deputy Campaigns Director Carroll Muffett issued the following statement:

"Since the Waxman-Markey bill left the Energy and Commerce committee, yet another fleet of industry lobbyists has weakened the bill even more, and further widened the gap between what Waxman-Markey does and what science demands. As a result, Greenpeace opposes this bill in its current form. We are calling upon Congress to vote against this bill unless substantial measures are taken to strengthen it. Despite President Obama’s assurance that he would enact strong, science-based legislation, we are now watching him put his full support behind a bill that chooses politics over science, elevates industry interests over national interest, and shows the significant limitations of what this Congress believes is possible.

Obama no more wants to reform healthcare than the man in the moon.

If he was serious, he'd be LBJ-ing, not townhalling.

These staged events are insulting.

Obama’s advisors should be taken to the woodshed for not developing a better message about health care cost containment. Then again, he’s so brilliant, why didn’t he see this coming?

Now, that the CBO report says that the health care bills proposed in the House & Senate would not reduce costs, Obama quickly scheduled a presser today (w/o taking any questions, BTW) to try to do some damage control and chastize Congress. He used some Bush-style scare tactics — he warned that if health insurance reform isn’t passed by October that, “no one’s health insurance is going to be secure.”

So, now it’s health insurance reform and not health care reform? (We see how the banking reforms are going! Love those corporate reforms! LOL!)

Why doesn’t he just grown a spine and tell the American people, that true reform will cost more in the short term, that it’ll take some dough to build a better system, but over time, when the better system produces better outcomes, that cost-savings will be realized.

Nope. It’s all about the political agenda, rather than doing what is required for the long term. The politicians — including Obama — already have their eye on 2010 mid-terms.

Obama seems committed to getting something done, even if it’s wrong.

I defy anyone to explain Obama's health *reform* plan.

The House should NOT pass a healthcare bill before the August recess.

First, single payer should be put back on the table, the discussions should continue, the president should take a real leadership role (LBJ-style) and get the damned thing done right.

When Obama farmed out the details to Congress (to be not Clinton), he allowed things to go off the rails. Now, he thinks he can get things back on track with his rhetorical flourishes, but in fact, he continues to haggle and make petty bargains with the AMA, Big Pharma, insurance companies, etc.

In other words, he's a classic huckster.

Well, Politico may be a pack of whores, and they write disingenuous headlines, but the bigger problem is that the elected Republicans and Democrats don't give a damn about the citizens, which means our government is rotted, broken, and ineffective. They don't care because they know there's a damned good chance they will be reelected anyway.

Obama trots out there yakking it up about the dire necessity of health INSURANCE reform, then takes a back seat. He has no intention of rocking the corporate boats. But, I digress....

Looking forward, perhaps progressives should be focusing on building a viable third party, rather than hammering away at the two parties that aren't worth jackshit.

with his secret deals with Big Pharma. The hopey-changey president is a fraud. Go to the NYT today:

Pressed by industry lobbyists, White House officials on Wednesday assured drug makers that the administration stood by a behind-the-scenes deal to block any Congressional effort to extract cost savings from them beyond an agreed-upon $80 billion. . .

"We were assured: 'We need somebody to come in first. If you come in first, you will have a rock-solid deal,' " Billy Tauzin, the former Republican House member from Louisiana who now leads the pharmaceutical trade group, said Wednesday. "Who is ever going to go into a deal with the White House again if they don't keep their word? You are just going to duke it out instead."

. . .

Mr. Tauzin said the administration had approached him to negotiate. "They wanted a big player to come in and set the bar for everybody else," he said. He said the White House had directed him to negotiate with Senator Max Baucus, the business-friendly Montana Democrat who leads the Senate Finance Committee.

He's not running for anything.

Why is this any of our business?

Tawdry of you, Alex, and your editors to publish this crap.