Tweety sez Obama didn't campaign on the public option. He's WRONG and needs to apologize!
By John Amato Saturday Oct 10, 2009 7:00am
Chris Matthews is getting all hot and bothered because liberals in Congress and from the netroots are pushing hard to get a public option included in health care reform. That's called legislating, Chris. It's a long, hard process sometimes.
The Village really gets upset when dirty f*&king hippies get uppity and speak out on issues that matter. Villagers don't care that America voted in Obama with a mandate on health-care reform. Villagers don't care that America rejected conservatism, which practically caused the world to almost spin off its axis. It's getting to the point that Tweety is pulling stuff out of his pie hole because he hates us so much. And apparently Tweety forgot that "the left" was elected in droves in 2008. "The Left" is not a fringe teabagger, tax evading group, it dominates the House of Representatives. Here he is on Andrea Mitchell talking about Obama and Afghanistan and see where Tweety goes with it all.
Matthews: Everybody is doing their politics here. She represents San Francisco and she represents, I know the Speaker's role. you have to respond to the nosiest elements in your caucus, and the most passionate and apparently, I assume just knowing the Democratic House, the voices she's hearing from every single day are the left who want out. Now this president never promised to get out of Afghanistan. And he's not gonna...
He never promised to pull out, that was the good war, the necessary war. Oh, by the way he never ran on the public option. Somebody's got to tell these people on the left and the netroots and some of our colleagues, yeah, he might like the idea of a public option, he may prefer it. He didn't run on it. He didn't get elected for it. So this idea that he somehow betrayed a left wing mandate is nonsense.
Where to begin. Why is it OK to attack Nancy Pelosi for representing San Francisco? What did they ever do to Bill O'Reilly and Tweety? Aren't they part of the US of A too? That she is from the Bay Area somehow minimizes the fact that she's the Speaker. On Afghanistan, he's right. President Obama did not promises to withdraw from there. That's why we on the left have to put pressure on the administration or we could be there for decades.
But President Obama did campaign on the public option., It was part of his health-care plan that he unveiled in the primaries. I asked Ezra Klein to verify it for me and he did.
Berkeley's Jacob Hacker, who was the first to persuasively articulate it; to the Economic Policy Institute, which fleshed out the specifics; and to the Campaign for America's Future, which took the lead in selling it to advocacy groups and the presidential campaigns. John Edwards picked it up and made it central to his proposal, and the other candidates followed suit to protect their left flanks.
And I found that Paul Krugman has it also.
The idea of letting individuals buy insurance from a government-run plan was introduced in 2007 by Jacob Hacker of Yale, was picked up by John Edwards during the Democratic primary, and became part of the original Obama health care plan.
Tweety needs to apologize to President Obama, the netroots and the liberals in Congress who he just smeared in this clip. We are fighting for real health-care reform in America and not some mythical-bipartisan Beltway compromise bill that is completely useless to all the real working families that the Villagers like to pretend they speak for all the time.
(h/t Heather at Video Cafe)
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Well, he DID promise to be out of Iraq in 16 months, I'm curious how that is going...
WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 (UPI) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved a request from his top military commander in Iraq for extended troop deployments beyond January elections.
in our lifetime.
doing deals with Republicans who are trying to destroy him, and the very predatory industries that are precisely the problem with American healthcare.
That needs to change.
right! I was pissed to hear tweety's idiotic statement. Thanks for this post, John!
If Tweety had to apologize for being wrong he'd have no time to actually be wrong.
(something like that)
reform of the predatory wealth extraction system masquerading as national healthcare.
Wealthcare for Billionaires!
Doesn't deserve representation...
nah, don't listen to them. Screw the public option and make your insurance lobby happy.
Everything he said was very accurate, so now we are pissed because he said something we don't wanna hear?
Also, can you please point out which words exactly he used to attack Pelosi for being from San Francisco?
If you think everything he said was accurate - why are you asking questions?
Hmmmmmm?
Matthews: Everybody is doing their politics here. She represents San Francisco
Implying that she's promoting "San Francisco politics" (what ever that is) over doing her job, that something is wrong and different about SF beliefs, and that SF is all of one belief (radical).
All merely by mentioning the unrelated fact that she reps SF.
It's very subtle and easy to weasel out of, but it's there nonetheless.
Does that work for you?
Tweety is a moron! Next question?
It's amazing, we don't use arguments anymore, we just call people we don't like names. Sometimes I feel that those who share the same political belief with me can be like the loud nonsense crowd that appeared in Palin's campaign rallies.
stuff
Matthews is the weakest leg of MSNBC prime time. Hardball has always had an Hard On for the Villagers. He's a legacy when all cable news copied the FOX format -- when no Dem could do right and all Progressives are DFHs. It sometimes squeaks out from time to time. (I've never liked his voice either.)
Matthews is like an ugly plant given to you by disliked In-laws. You place him in farthest corners of the patio and purposely forget to water the damn thing. But he just keeps hanging on anyways.
In a case like this I don't think these second hand comments are much proof. Surely you can find a speech where Obama actually said it himself.
I find too many to list
I trust this will suffice:
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/healthcare/
IMO √
but I would be happy if MSNBC replaced Matthews with Dylan Ratigan. That would be quite a lineup. Ratigan, Schultz, Olbermann, and Maddow. I'm sure everyone has someone better than Ratigan to replace Tweety but I'm trying to keep it narrowed down to MSNBC folks. Any ideas?
I've been watching On the Edge with Max Keiser at http://maxkeiser.com/ . He's been describing banks, like Goldman Sachs, as Economic Terrorists for at least a year.
Now putting Max on MSNBC late night would be truly subversive.
Has there ever been a demographic analysis of the Obama win?
I'd be interested in numbers of first time voters, young voters, women voters (including suburban moms), male middle-class voters and the elderly.
Here's the quote from his official campaign document, The Blueprint For Change - Barack Obama's Plan For America:
Quality, Affordable and Portable Coverage for All
(1) Obama’s Plan to Cover Uninsured
Obama will make available a new national health plan so all Americans, including the self-employed and small businesses, can buy affordable health coverage that is similar to the plan available to members of Congress.
The Obama Plan will have the Following Features:
• Guaranteed Eligibility: No American will be turned away FROM ANY INSURANCE PLAN
because of illness or pre-existing conditions.
• Comprehensive Benefits: The benefit package will be similar to that offered through Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), the plan members of Congress have. The plan will cover all essential medical services, including preventive, maternity and mental health care.
• Affordable Premiums, Co-Pays and Deductibles.
• Subsidies: Individuals and families who do not qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP but still need
financial assistance will receive an income-related federal subsidy to buy into the new public plan or purchase a private health care plan.
• Simplified Paperwork and Reined in Health Costs.
• Easy Enrollment: The new public plan will be simple to enroll in and provide ready access to coverage.
• Portability and Choice: Participants in the new public plan and the National Health Insurance Exchange (see below) will be able to move from job to job without changing or jeopardizing their health care coverage.
• Quality and Efficiency: Participating insurance companies in the new public program will be required to report data to ensure that standards for quality, health information technology and
administration are being met.
I campaigned for the President and voted for him. Time for the rubber to hit the road.
Shouldn't that read pelosi represents the noisiest elements of her caucus?
Otherwise it sounds like she supports rhinoplasty.
Oh wait, look who I'm talking about.
http://notesfromtherustbelt.blogspot.com/2009...
What Tweety said during that episode this week was, "Gee folks, especially you lefties, this public option thing doesn't have a chance in hell of passing through Congress. I should apologize for my earlier characterizations of its importance, often illustrated here on my five o'clock program on MSNBC, but its all about politics, not policy, and we are the place for politics. Maybe these past few months I would have better served my viewers sharing with them the positions of the congressional members I speak with who are in a position to know how the Senate and House will vote instead of the constant back and forth between party strategists. I did so well during the Scooter Libby trial, I'm very sorry I let you all down here, with this health care reform sausage making as I like to call it. Oh well, we'll get 'em next time."
Hardball is only worth watching when Lawrence O'Donnell hosts.
It sounds like he's trying to contradict both liberals and conservatives: liberals who want single payer of public option and conservatives who claim Obama is this arch-liberal.
on this one. What the President actually talked about during the campaign was his support for the single payer system not a compromise public option. As Tweety says, Obama must stick to what he talked about during the campaign. No compromises allowed.
Read my comments here:
http://notesfromtherustbelt.blogspot.com/2009...
...but I think you're mistaken on this. "Single Payer" was the preferred talking point here with the netroots, but it wasn't being pushed by Obama during the campaign.
Take a look at jonrey100's post above (@ 08:41). There's no mention of single payer. And while it doesn't use the term "public option", most of the bullet points in that part of The Blueprint for Change jibe with what we now refer to as the "public option".
Iraq to produce a stand up comic like this Afghan guy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sgsl9egSIUc
There just isn't any reason to think that tiger is going to change his stripes. He has never had a grasp of truth as a concept. Fact is meaningless because he doesn't understand it, what do you really expect of him? He is a really poor entertainer that has to work up the dullest people in the world that come on his show to entertain an audience that is half beltway or news organizations. He's an entertainer.
Orson Welles didn't think the people would go insane in New Jersey when he did "War of the Worlds" on radio. The lesson learned was turned upon the public the next day and we have been subject to fiction ever since.
This has been the meme that tweety and mrs. greenspan have been floating for the last two weeks. Since there has been no one in their staged 'conversations' that says 'no, the president campainged on the fact there must be a public option to keep the insurance companies honest' and site a date and time for it's provenence. He had Melissa Henneberger, I think that is her name, on with some schlub from politico, and she tried to rebut the claim and he ran over her. His concerted effort is to blame 'the left' for the president's travails as opposed to the net roots holding the President to a stated position.
Villagers don't care that America voted in Obama with a mandate on health-care reform.....And apparently Tweety forgot that "the left" was elected in droves in 2008.
Regardless of whether Obama included health care in his campaign, he definitely was not elected with a mandate on health care reform. He was elected with a mandate on not being George Bush. That's about all.
I also think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that "the left" was elected in droves in 2008. True, "Democrats" were elected in droves, but ask Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid exactly how "left" the blue dogs and other conservative dems are. Not very. And they wouldn't have been elected if they were.
I doubt he'll apologize. He should I agree, but he should lose credibility and hopefully be replaced by a real liberal. I know he has a long contract though, but if his ratings go low enough who knows.
and he makes GE/MBC look like idiots for employing him.
No San Francisco isn't part of the Real America, it's that phony, gay, unpatriotic part of America...you know, like Massachusetts.
I personally witnessed Obama promise a public option in a campaign speech he gave in Indianapolis, so don't try to tell me he NEVER promised it. I WAS THERE!
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