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Max Baucus finally unveiled his new/old bill from the Senate Finance committee today and as has been expected the bill is all about bowing down to the minority party that has no intentions of supporting any type of health care reform. He's chucked aside America just to try and land one Republican vote in the Senate... errrr... I mean, the House of Lords.

Sen. Rockefeller has been very outspoken about his opposition to the Baucus Dogs bill and says as much while many other Democrats are not pleased either.

Baucus Bill: Rockefeller Says Dem Senators Are Not Pleased

On Andrea Mitchell, Sen. Kent Conrad came on at the end of the show and read off a list of things that Republicans should be so happy to support in the bill. It was as if Baucus and Conrad wrote a bill that caters to the Republicans and his Gang of Six committee. It was disgusting watching him gush when he said there was no public option in the bill because Republicans didn't want it. He then read off more and more things that Grassley wants in the bill and it's as if he really thinks there's a chance in hell that they will vote for his bill.

Actually, it's a bill nobody but self-eviscerating Dems will vote for.

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Hold back the jello. Jay Rockefeller was on this morning with Andrea Mitchell and complained about the Kent Conrad "co-op" plan which he said was basically unworkable. He then went on The Ed show and hit it even harder. Jay is a supporter of the public option and was pissed that the co-op proposal was inserted in the Baucus bill since it was never even talked about during the general election. Isn't it nice that Baucus has killed the public option just to work with Republicans? Conservatives don't even have to win elections to get what they want. That's some deal they have.

Ed: It's not going to work. There's really no successful model out there to support the basis of signing on to a co-op. Would you sign on to a co-op or is that unacceptable?

Rockefeller: That's unacceptable and I can almost prove it. We've been in touch with all the folks that oversee, represent all the co-ops in the country on all subjects and they point out that there are probably less than twenty health co-ops in the country. There are only two that really work that well. One in Puget Sound, one in Minnesota, except for those two, they are all unlicensed. All present health co-ops are all unlicensed, they're unregulated. Nobody knows anything about them, nobody has any control over them and nobody has ever said, which is stunning to me, no government organization or private organization has ever done a study to what effect they might have in terms of bringing down the insurance prices.

They are untested, they are unlicensed, they are unregulated, they are unstudied. Why would we even think about putting them in as a control on this massive insurance industry instead of the public option?

There aren't any co-ops throughout much of the country, but to appease the conservative Dems we're supposed to throw six billion dollars around and hope that the states will try to make them workable. Is this insane? Watch the whole clip, but you get the idea from this one statement. Kent Conrad's big proposal is a complete sham, but President Baucus is trying to cram that down the throats of the country, which will render all health-care reform useless. All hail bipartisanship!

When I first read this report, I admit that I got angry. Then I got smart. Look carefully at the names named in this report. Isn't it interesting that the WaPo reporters made sure to point out the Democrats in attendance when Congress was still operating under a Republican majority? Hmmm....who do you suppose could have leaked this story to the press to perhaps deflect from their own negative stories?

No matter how you slice it, there's some serious 'splaining that needs to be done, but the lopsidedness of this article makes me more than a little leery of its accuracy.

WaPo:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.[..]

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.[..]

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Anything that involves Sen. Pat Roberts is damned to be worthless.

As georgia10 notes:

The Senate Intelligence Committee voted today not to investigate the crimes of President George W. Bush. Instead, it will create a subcommittee for "oversight" of the illegal eavesdropping program....read on

Senator Rockefeller had this to say after the committee's vote:

"This committee is basically under control of the White House,'' Rockefeller told reporters after the two-hour meeting today in Washington. "It's an unprecedented bout of political pressure from the White House.''

FDL says that "there is no such thing as a moderate Republican."

On FOX News Sunday, Bill Kristol (who I have no love for) defended Russ Feingold's censure resolution and called it a smart political move, one that defining the warrantless wiretapping illegal. Brit Hume wins the honorary "Rove/Mehlman award" for spewing out as much GOP talking points as is possible in the smallest allotted time.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT (5 minutes David Edwards)

Kristol: I think Feingold has succeeded in casting a big cloud over the President's program.

Wallace: Do you think it's helping Democrats and hurting Republicans?

Kristol: Absolutely, as long as the charge is out there and not rebutted?

Hume: "That is absurd. No politician among those who have been thoroughly briefed on this claims the briefings were insufficient and vague…Rockefeller does not claim that. Rockefeller has said many things about this program, but he has never said that he wasn't fully briefed that I know of."

As Judd points out, Rockefeller did raise concerns:

Rockefeller: "Clearly, the activities we discussed raised profound oversight issues…I feel unable to evaluate, much less endorse, these activities…without more information…I simply cannot satisfy lingering concerns raised by the briefing…

Murray Waas:

"And did those leaks damage national security? The vice-chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) made exactly that charge tonight in a letter to John Negroponte, the Director of National Intelligence. What prompted Rockefeller to write Negroponte was a recent op-ed in the New York Times by CIA director Porter Goss complaining that leaks of classified information were the fault of “misguided whistleblowers...read on”

Senators Roberts and Rockefeller Debate

On Fox News Sunday, Senators Roberts and Rockefeller debated intelligence.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Think Progress: Appearing on Fox New Sunday, Chris Wallace asked, "What about this question, Sen. Roberts, about whether or not-the fact is you didn’t get the same intelligence. Is that a legitimate concern?"

Roberts acknowledged: "It may be a concern to some extent."...read on

FiredogLake has a few choice words for Chris Wallace: Define Imminent: The new GOP meme, as repeated by White House marionette Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday this morning, is that "The President never said Saddam posed an imminent threat."...read on

Cheney, Libby Blocked Papers To Senate Intelligence Panel

Murray Waas: "Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources...read on"

Here's a crucial piece of info: " Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community."

Here's a new key player: "Administration sources also said that Cheney's general counsel, David Addington, played a central role in the White House decision not to turn over the documents."

There is a lot to discuss here, but: "I doubt if the votes would have been there," Roberts said. Rockefeller asserted, "We in Congress would not have authorized that war, in 75 votes, if we knew what we know now."

Senate Intelligence Committee, Republican Pat Roberts and Democrat Jay Rockefeller were on Meet the Press today.

RUSSERT: When will we see phase two of your investigation about the shaping or exaggeration of intelligence by policy-makers?

Video-WMP

Roberts:... And to go back in and to keep going over this over and over again, I'm more than happy to finish this, and I want to finish it, but we have other things that we need to do.

An important issue like this is now being swept under the rug.

MR. RUSSERT: The United States went to war...

That's right, we went to war because of information that the administration pressured to hear, and Roberts thinks we have better things to do, and is not happy to answer Tim's questions about it.

ROCKEFELLER: Pat and I have agreed to do it. We've shaken hands on it, and we agreed to do it after the elections so it wouldn't be any sort of sense of a political attack... If policy-makers are going to misuse or shape or hype or change or try to pressure that intelligence into being something different, they're the ones who decide, the policy-makers, whether we'll go to war or not, not the intelligence community. This is at the core of what we have to be prepared for, to do correctly for the next 30 or 40 years during the war on terrorism.

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