I could almost feel bad about picking on poor Ruth Marcus, another overpaid Washington Post columnist, lawyer and true Villager (married to the head of the FTC). After all, she's probably just looking out for her boss, and Amato did just chide her yesterday.

But when you read this petulant hatchet job on Rich Trumka and progressive taxation, I think you'll understand:

This graphic depiction of income inequality is, understandably enough, at the center of Trumka's worldview, a perspective that became clear when he came to lunch last week at The Post. Growing income inequality is troubling. It would be troubling in the absence of a budget crisis. But that does not mean, as Trumka would have it, that the solution to the nation's fiscal woes is always, or only, reducing income inequality.

In short, soaking the rich gets you only so far.

Take, for example, what Trumka calls "the current deficit hysteria" and its cousin, entitlement spending. "We don't have an entitlement problem," Trumka says. "We have a revenue problem." In the world according to Trumka, no benefits need be cut, no retirement ages adjusted. Simply requiring the rich to pay a fairer share would bridge the gap.

I'm all for a more progressive tax code. But consider: The Tax Policy Center examined what it would take to avoid raising taxes on families earning less than $250,000 a year while reducing the deficit to 3 percent of the economy by decade's end. The top two rates would have to rise to 72.4 and 76.8 percent, more than double the current level. You don't have to be anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist to think this would be insane.

Amato's right: Ruth isn't one for reading history books, or she would know that in 1945, we had a 94% tax on income over $200,000. And it stayed at over 90% until 1964, when it was lowered to 77%. Of course, Republicans have been hacking away at it since then!

Or ask Trumka about whether the eligibility age for Social Security, now 62 for partial benefits, should be raised. This former coal miner -- and son and grandson of coal miners -- erupts. His father worked 44 years in the mines, suffering from black lung, "and if you had said to my dad, 'You have to work until you're 63,' that would have been a death sentence." Fair enough. Some people may need special protection.

But, an editor asks, gesturing around the gleaming conference table at the middle-aged assembly, what about those who do not work in such punishing occupations and for whom the current system would provide two, maybe three, decades of benefits? "What's wrong with that?" Trumka asks indignantly. "The rest of the world does that!" Yes, and how are things going in Greece?

Fresh from The Post, Trumka told the new fiscal responsibility commission that the best way to fix Social Security would be to raise or eliminate the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security tax.

Again, sounds simple, and raising the cap makes sense -- in isolation. But combined with other taxes on the wealthiest? The Congressional Budget Office estimated that raising the cap to cover 90 percent of earnings would raise taxes on the highest earners by 6 percent for those born in the 1960s and by 15 percent for those born in the 2000s. Add that to higher income tax rates and you're talking real money, although that change would fill only about one-third of the shortfall.

Oh, boo frickin' hoo! Why, I can hardly see through my tears. Hey Ruth, the working and middle classes have been carrying the weight for the wealthiest for a while now, and they've been making out like bandits. Are you seriously suggesting that we continue to carry the burden because... well, because you like it that way?

Finally, ask Trumka about whether generous pensions and health benefits promised to public employees remain affordable -- were they ever? -- in light of strapped state budgets. Should public employees be called on to sacrifice? Trumka fairly bursts with outrage: "Were they the ones that caused this crisis? Were they the ones that lost 20 percent of the wealth in this country?"

No, but isn't it hard to defend outsize benefits to public-sector employees when wages elsewhere are stagnant and the unemployment rate is so high? Not to Trumka. "Why is that hard to defend when a guy in a hedge fund made $4.4 billion last year?"

Guys in hedge funds make outrageous sums. Union members -- even public-sector union members -- don't. Trumka's frustration is reasonable. His one-sided, tax-the-rich reflex is not. It is the shortsighted bookend to the no-new-taxes mantra of the ideologues on the other side of this stale, and seemingly stalemated, debate.

Let's get this straight. Because you and your husband (and your bosses) are used to a certain serene lifestyle, it seems only fair that nothing disturbs it. So instead of having the rich finally start to carry a proportionate burden, you offer to split the difference with those so battered by the wealthy in the past ten years?

Really, Ruth. You should be ashamed of yourself.

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It's funny how right-wing talkers and their Beltway Village cohort really hate it when you point out how the lax regulatory oversight that resulted in the horrific Gulf oil spill originated in the Bush/Cheney administration.

Today at President Obama's press conference, it was Villager Chip Reid's turn to be all offended:

REID: Secondly with regard to the Minerals Management Service, Secretary Salazar yesterday basically blamed the Bush administration for the cozy relationship there.

And you seemed to suggest that when you spoke in the Rose Garden a few weeks ago when you said, for too long, a decade or more -- most of those years, of course, the Bush administration -- there's been a cozy relationship between the oil companies and federal agency that permits them to drill.

But you knew as soon as you came in, and Secretary Salazar did, about this cozy relationship. But you continued to give permits -- some of them under questionable circumstances. Is it fair to blame the Bush administration? Don't you deserve some of that?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well -- well, let -- let me just make the point that I made earlier, which is, Salazar came in and started cleaning house, but the culture had not fully changed in MMS. And absolutely, I take responsibility for that. There -- there wasn't sufficient urgency in terms of the pace of how those changes needed to take place.

There is no evidence that some of the corrupt practices that had taken place earlier took place under the current administration's watch, but a culture in which oil companies were able to get what they wanted, without sufficient oversight and regulation, that was a real problem. Some of it was constraints of the law, as I just mentioned. But we should have busted through those constraints.

This was just too much for Megyn Kelly and her right-wing pal Mike Gallagher, who devoted a post-conference panel on Fox bewailing how wrong it was for anyone to blame poor George W. Bush for any of this.

Gallagher burst into crocodile tears, saying it was wrong for people to blame Obama now -- because they shouldn't have been unhappy with Bush's handling of Hurricane Katrina, either:

Gallagher: There has been way too much finger-pointing going on, and frankly, as a Bush supporter, it frustrates me to see Obama critics do the same kind of thing that people try to do with George Bush. Now, having said that, it does seem like that answer was trying to again have Barack Obama point the finger of blame at the Bush administration to some degree. It's regrettable. All of this finger-pointing is counter-productive.

You know, we could have done one of two things, Megyn with this horrible oil spill -- we could have reacted, or we could have responded. Now that finally this flow has stopped, may we go forward and respond and be proactive and, and learn from what went wrong.

But this was a tragic accident that should not have been laid at the doorstep of either George Bush or Barack Obama, or even BP for that matter! No one wanted this to happen, they did everything they could to respond appropriately, and I think the blame game has just been absolutely appalling. And it's very distressing, and it breaks my heart to see what's happened the past few days.

Yeah, we can't blame BP because they didn't want it to happen -- they just decided to take the cheaper and far riskier route when drilling this well, thanks to the handy green light they got from the Bush/Cheney MMS.

Fortunately, the panel's token liberal, radio host Mark Levine, managed to make the salient point about all this:

Levine: Look, we've learned one thing -- if you don't learn from history, you're condemned to repeat it. The Republicans and conservatives have a philosophy -- they'll tell it to you all the time. They don't like any kind of government regulation, they trust corporations to do the right thing, they want government to get off the back of corporations, and not to regulate anything!

And we see what happens. When the Bush administration fills these regulatory agencies with a bunch of people watching porn and not caring, in bed with the oil companies.

This just produced more crocodile tears from Gallagher: "This makes me so sad," he said. Yeah, we bet. So sad.

After all, we recall how right-wing defenders of Bush, for the entirety of his tenure, blamed every conceivable obstacle he faced on Bill Clinton.

The first Bush recession? Clinton's fault. The 9/11 attacks? Definitely Clinton's fault. (Remember The Path to 9/11?) Indeed, they even tried to blame the 2008 Bush recession on Bill Clinton. They never gave up.

And of course, before Barack Obama was even sworn into office, they began calling the last Bush recession "the Obama recession"

Well, as we observed last time we heard this whine:

Continue reading »

Wouldn't you like to see a host who really knows the topics take a shot at running ABC's THIS WEEK for once? ABC is using a former Bushie Matthew Dowd as a host this Sunday:

Matthew Dowd, who worked as chief strategist for the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign, is getting a shot behind the anchor desk on ABC's “This Week."

Since news broke that George Stephanopoulos was heading to “Good Morning America” in December, the network has had five different fill-in hosts while deciding who’ll get the job permanently: Jake Tapper, Terry Moran, Barbara Walters, Jonathan Karl and Elizabeth Vargas.

Still, Dowd—who has been an ABC political contributor since 2007, and regular on the Sunday roundtable—will be the first non-journalist to have a chance asking the questions. Dowd's just scheduled for this week, as the network continues looking for a permanent host.

Pretty soon they'll be trying out right-wing talk show hosts. I think it's time Stewart gets a shot to host the Sunday show. Hey, he may not want to do it, but he's not afraid to step into the political arena and duke it out, so why not give this one a try? I bet you'll see somebody that would have a clear understanding of the issues and not be worried about protecting his Villager image with the rest of the Beltway elites.

It would be a ratings bonanza for ABC as well.

We want Jon Stewart to host ABC's THIS WEEK.

You can email ABC here.

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I have to say I'm glad David Barstow at the NY Times wrote about the real core of the Tea Party movement being a revival of the militia movement, but it's very annoying too. David Neiwert and I have been writing on this subject ever since Fox News helped launch this extreme conservative coalition into action. The Villager elders all saw it too, but were afraid to put them in proper context. Barstow at least gives them some "official" cover to finally start calling them out.

Tea Partiers may say they are an independent movement, but their values are arch-conservative, and in the end it still benefits the GOP and their corporatist owners. A new CNN poll shows that 87% of them would vote for the GOP if there was no nobody endorsed by the Tea Party movement in their district.

Michael Steele met with 50 Tea Party activists for over four hours the other day because the GOP is very nervous that they would actually start a third-party movement and splinter the vote. If the Tea Party activists were serious, they would run their own presidential candidate in 2012.

Greta Van Susteren interviewed Amy Kremer, a Tea Party activist (who doesn't like the Birthers unlike Palin) about the Steele meeting and she made clear that the Tea Partiers were working strictly with the Republican Party; it hadn't crossed her mind to talk to the Democratic Party, too, until Greta asked her about it as a signal that they were, you know, truly cough cough *nonpartisan* cough hack.

As you can see in the video, Michael Steele was all worried that the Tea Partiers would be concerned that the meeting was about the GOP co-opting the Tea Party movement, which he assured them was far from the truth, as indeed it was. This was kinda like a sea lion assuring a transient killer whale that it had no intention of eating him.

Meanwhile, Andrea Mitchell interviewed another of the Tea Party leaders at the meeting, a woman named Lisa Miller, and she essentially said, as have many others in the Teabagger movement, that they actually want to take over the GOP. No ifs, ands or buts:

Miller: The Republican Party, based on its platform, has much in common with the Tea Party, but local and state parties don't necessarily reflect those values anymore. And so we're going to have to retake, if you will, the Republican Party, as opposed to the Republican Party absorbing us.

If the DNC held meetings with a liberal activist coalition that said the GOP are Nazis, traitors and not born in America, the media would be going crazy, and Fox News would be calling them psychos. (We remember the Senate condemnations of MoveOn.org for daring to criticize Bush's Iraq War general and for a supposed "Hitler ad" it never produced.)

Here's more on the meeting:

Around 50 leaders representing 30 Tea Party groups met with Steele and other GOP advisers to talk about strategies and the importance of conservatism in the 2010 midterm elections.

"The chairman believes it is extremely important to listen to this significant grass-roots movement and work to find common ground in order to elect officials that will protect these principles," RNC spokesperson Katie Wright told the Washington Post.

Not all Tea Party activists supported the meeting, however, as Talking Points Memo reported:

In an email to TPMmuckraker, Robin Stublen, another Florida-based Tea Party activist who has argued previously against working with the GOP, warned of "a back door attempt by the RNC to put their 'stamp' on the movement that welcomes all conservatives regardless of political party."

Oh, they aren't extremists. I mean, wanting to hang Patty Murray is quite normal, isn't it?

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Correction: I misheard O'Reilly on this: He said "blackboard," not "black boy." My apologies. The text has been edited to reflect this.

Bill O'Reilly has been irked at Joe Klein since last October, after Klein wrote a typical Villager piece for Time castigating President Obama for standing up to Fox News. That's not what upset O'Reilly, though. Rather, it was these lines:

Let me be precise here: Fox News peddles a fair amount of hateful crap. Some of it borders on sedition. Much of it is flat out untrue.

So last night on Fox, O'Reilly finally got his chance to pin Klein down for this, and found he had his hands full defending Glenn Beck:

Klein: I have worked with an awful lot of Fox journalists, the ones who actually bring you the news, like Carl Cameron and Major Garrett.

O'Reilly: And those people are good guys, right?

Klein: Those -- those are good guys, I think you're a good guy, we come from the same neck of the woods.

But I think that your pal Glenn Beck is peddling a lot of hateful crap.

O'Reilly: But he's funny! He's doing it in a funny way! What's hateful about it?

Klein: Oh, he's doing a hilarious -- I thought the part where he describes the president as intentionally steering the airplane of state into the ground was hilarious. And the stuff about Obama not being an American citizen? That was hysterical!

O'Reilly: He's got a blackboard out there, he's got a phone to the White House -- look, he is everyman sitting on a barstool. Why shouldn't everyman have a show?

Klein: No, no, he is Father Coughlin trying to delude and entertain the American people.

O'Reilly: That's such baloney. That's the left-wing line, that this guy is a threat to the union. If anybody thinks Glenn Beck is a threat to the union, they're insane!

Actually, the comparison to Father Coughlin is more than appropriate -- it fits like a glove.

And dontcha just love how Beck being "funny" means he isn't hateful? I understand Theodore Bilbo was quite the crackup too.

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Dana Bash interviewed the most hated man in America on The Situation Room and he had the balls to call what we have now a "progressive" health-care bill.

BASH: But you talked about the fact that on this particular issue, a Medicare buy-in, you have changed your position and you've said it's because things have changed. The deficits are high and Medicare is in more trouble -- the system.

LIEBERMAN: Yes.

BASH: But give me a little straight talk like your friend John McCain gives. Is it also that you philosophically have moved to the right a little bit?

LIEBERMAN: No, I don't think so. I mean, actually, this is a very progressive bill. The parts that I didn't like are taken out, I'm prepared to support. I've always believed that government has to be there when nobody else will be there to help people. But in this country we don't believe the government should take over everything. And for me, that's what's been on the line here. What kind of future are we going to have? And of course all of this goes to the debt -- the national debt and taxes. If government takes over everything -- the public option is something the public will pay for. And that means higher taxes. That's why I did that.

Didn't you know that John McCain won the election and put Lieberman in charge of health care reform?

There was nothing in this bill that could be considered a government takeover of health care in America, but don't ask a Villager to make Lieberman be honest about it. He has his bullshit fallback position and they just eat up his words and move on. Opening up Medicare to people at age fifty-five would have only helped Americans.

You know that if a health-care bill does pass, Joe Lieberman will take full credit for it. He'll be out there saying that it shows how incredible our system of government is. The media -- who love Lieberman and consider him a real independent soul who was forced out of the Dem party because of the dirty hippies -- will praise Joe's leadership on getting a bill passed.

Since the media believe liberals should always lose, they will relish the opportunity to promote Lieberman all over the TV because they know how much it will piss us off. Anybody who gives that lowlife props should be vilified early and often.

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Andrea Mitchell asked a Villager health-care panel on her show today to discuss how Harry Reid can get to 60 votes with the public option since the "Gang of Four" refuses to budge and threatens to kill health-care reform entirely.

Mitchell: And Ruth Marcus, what do they do, how do they water down the public option to make it acceptable to some of the moderates but placate some of the more liberals?

Marcus: Well, it's the "and still placate some of the more liberals" is the hardest part. You're dealing with a very complex Rubik's cube really at this point because every time you change something to please someone, you're annoying someone else and potentially losing his or her vote.

But the public option, I think, could be scaled back. There is already something that Sen. Carper from Delaware is working on in terms of allowing it to take effect perhaps more quickly in states or immediately in states which have very high costs and other states could opt in. There is Sen. Snowe's old trigger option that one could still pull the trigger on, so there are ways of doing it.

I think that in the end it is possible to mollify enough of the centrist Democrats, perhaps even a Republican -- now that seems awfully remote. The president, I think, is going to have to tell the left wing of his party and the balking liberal Senators that it is crazy to pull down the entirety of health care over this one issue which the president has already said is not the be all end all of health reform.

It's always the liberals who need to compromise their positions to the conventional wisdom of the Villagers. The Gang of Four are all righteous and virtuous while liberals are out-of-control hippies who act like barking dogs. How dare they want to produce a real reform measure that could eventually provide true competition for the health care industry and that will help lower overall health care costs? Outrageous!

Remember, Marcus was being a concern troll the day after America elected Obama to the presidency with a mandate to overhaul health care and wrote a column telling him to not to govern from the left.

Yet the experience of President Bill Clinton's rocky early months -- remember gays in the military? the BTU tax? -- suggests the steep political price of governing in a way that is, or seems, skewed to the left. This risk is particularly acute for Obama, whose opponents have painted him as a leftist extremist. The good news is that his advisers seem exquisitely aware of this trap and determined not to fall into it.

As David Sirota wrote:

The standard lie about Clinton's failures aside (it was NAFTA, stupid), the last sentence is particularly odd. Obama's "opponents have painted him as a leftist extremist." Yet, that supposed "leftist extremist" won the largest presidential mandate in the last generation.

And somehow, having done that, we are supposed to believe that means he should tack to the right.

Say what?

Email Marcus and ask her why the Gang of Four aren't the real problem, since 56 other Senators are fine with the public option: marcusr@washpost.com

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(h/t Heather)

I can see that Ben Nelson and the Conservadems/Baucus Dogs have a plan. They bitch and moan about the effect a public option would have on the poor, poor health-insurance industry, so if they do have to vote for a public option in the Senate that clearly benefits Americans and not his favorite donors, they will only do it under the provision that the states "opt in" rather than "opt out."

His hair has been saying this for a while now.

Nelson's hair doesn't explain why he favors the "opt in" version and Harwood doesn't bother to ask. And he can count on the media to not inform America what the differences are in an opt in or an opt out version of the PO so when we complain about it the Villagers will attack us. He was interviewed by John Hardwood, a Villager of the highest order on MSNBC.

Here's what Ben Nelson's hair said:

Harwood: You'd agree that unless a comprehensive health care bill would pass that it would cripple his presidency.

Nelson's hair: Well, I don't know that we should conclude that some form of health care reform won't pass. I believe that some form of health care will pass.

Harwood: What in your mind are stoppers, things that, knowing this place, things that either because you oppose them or other senators oppose them, simply can 't be in the final product to have it pass?

Nelson's hair: Well, it's very difficult to see how that CLASS Act that was in the HELP committe bill would make it [that's long term care provisions] I think also any kind of public option that would undermine or destabilize the private insurance that 200 million Americans have, I don't see that that would make it. But some version such as an opt-in, for the states with a state option, that could very well be in.

Digby alerted me to this clip and she astutely writes:

But I am still suspicious that there might be a play to make opt-in the reasonable alternative to opt-out. It just keeps cropping up in all kinds of places, often from White House reporters. It's worth keeping an eye on anyway.

Harwood thinks that Nelson will stick with them on cloture and I haven't heard otherwise. (and if Harwood asked him he didn't say, the putz.) But he certainly keeps dangling himself out there as a vote for opt-in, so if this thing really comes down to the wire I could see it happening. Again, I don't think the village media have clue about just how different the two things are. It's just bumper sticker slogans to them.

The Hill reports that Sheldon Whitehouse also trumpeted the same thing.

The Senate health bill is drifting toward ending up with an "opt-in" provision versus an "opt-out," one Democratic senator said Friday.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) predicted that healthcare reform in the upper chamber would shift from its current construction, which allows states to opt out of a public option, to a version that forces states to opt into such a plan.

"I think it's falling into an opt-in, versus opt-out," Whitehouse said during an appearance on MSNBC. "You have a public option, but it's up to a state to take an affirmative act to take advantage of it."

Whitehouse suggested the opt-in as a potential compromise on the public option to win enough Democratic votes in the Senate, where Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) has said he will vote against a bill containing a public option, and several other centrist Democrats have been reluctant to support the current proposal.

I'm doing some digging around to see what's really happening and I'll have news soon. Reid is already having the "opt out" scored by the CBO, but my sources indicated that the Senate has not sent out the "opt in" to be scored. From what I'm hearing. The "opt in" would not pass the House conference.

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Rep. Anthony Weiner did his usual stellar job being the progressive voice on health care yesterday on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews. In typical Villager fashion, Matthews want to paint the public option as the "ultra liberal" position on health care, and Weiner helped set him straight:

MATTHEWS: OK, let me ask you this. What percentage, do you think, of Democrats in this country are liberals and what percent are moderates?

WEINER: I have no idea. I think...

MATTHEWS: Do you think most are liberals.

WEINER: I have to say...

MATTHEWS: Do you think most are liberals?

WEINER: No, here's what I think. I think when it comes to health care, the moderate position is choice and competition. I don't believe the public option is the liberal position. The liberal position is what I have, single payer for all Americans. This is the compromise position.

Of course, the whole point of painting the public option as the "far left" position is that, in Villagespeak, the liberal position is always doomed to being compromised by "centrist" Democrats. Which was the upshot of Matthews' interview -- namely, that liberals should be prepared to give up the public option to appease "centrists" in their own party.

Weiner had the perfect answer to that tripe:

WEINER: I think that we need to make the argument to my Democratic friends that this is an all-or-nothing strategy for us as Democrats. We run the country right now...

MATTHEWS: OK...

WEINER: ... House, Senate and the presidency.

MATTHEWS: OK...

WEINER: And if we can't do this (INAUDIBLE)

MATTHEWS: I've been talking around the Hill, talking to staffers and some members, and I've gotten to the point of disbelief. A lot of people like you believe that in the end, no good Democrat from wherever they are in the country is willing to be the man or woman who brings down the president's number one political ambition for this year, health care. And in the end, you folks believe that there'll be such tremendous pressure on all the Democrats, Nebraska, North Dakota, Arkansas, Louisiana, they'll still have to vote with the party. Do you believe that?

WEINER: Well, let me...

MATTHEWS: Do you believe that?

WEINER: Let me say yes but phrase it a different way. There's a divide here. Some people think a watered-down health care plan could be a success for us. Some, like myself, believe if we don't get this right...

MATTHEWS: OK...

WEINER: ... we're not going to get another chance for 20 years.

MATTHEWS: You're a good spokesman. Thank you, sir.

Blanche Lincoln, we hope you're listening.

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I was shocked that the media barely mentioned the public option during President Obama's media blitz today. David Gregory did discuss it on Meet The Press and told Obama that he essentially killed it. Obama denied it:

DAVID GREGORY: Like the public option. You effectively said to the left, "It's not gonna happen."

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well what I — no, no, that's not true. What I — what I've said is the public option, I think, should be a part of this but we shouldn't think that, somehow, that's the silver bullet that solves health care. What I've said, for example, on — what's called an individual mandate. During the campaign I said, "Look, if — health care is affordable, then I think people will buy it." So we don't have to say to — to folks, "You know what? You have to buy health care."

And — what — when I talked to health care experts on both the left and the right what they tell me is that, even after you make health care affordable, there's still gonna be some folks out there who — whether out of inertia, or they just don't want to but — spend the money — would rather take their chances.

Unfortunately, what that means, is then you and I and every American out there who has health insurance, and are paying their premiums responsibly every month, they've gotta pick up the cost for— emergency room care when one of those people gets sick. So what we've said as long as we're making this genuinely affordable to families then you've got an obligation to get health care just like you have an obligation to get auto insurance in every state.

The media shifted their narrative last week as I heard Villager after Villager say the public option was dead. We've been fighting for the public option tooth and nail in the blogosphere and also by strong progressive members of Congress.

Obama indicated in a Roll Call article today that it's not dead.

Obama maintained that while the centerpiece of his healthcare reform effort, a public (or "government-run") option, is absolutely not dead, it also is not the "silver bullet" that would instantaneously repair the nation's healthcare system.

"I absolutely do not believe that it's dead," Obama told Univision's "Al Punto" of the public option's fate. "I think that it's something that we can still include as part of a comprehensive reform effort."

But the president still signaled that the public option, a key reform for which he has pushed for months, would not serve as a panacea for healthcare problems.

"What I've said is the public option, I think, should be a part of this but we shouldn't think that, somehow, that's the silver bullet that solves healthcare," Obama said on NBC's "Meet the Press" with David Gregory, rejecting the idea that he'd effectively told liberals that the public option will not be included in reform.

You can look at his statement about it not being the holy grail of health reform as either a way to not back the American people's support for the public option or a way to keep it alive and then have it come in after the House and Senate join their bills.

He could also be telling the naysayers that since it's a small part of the plan---stop fighting it and get on board. We're still speculating and reading the tea leaves at this point until we do have a real bill to analyze, but I think we know that he's going to try and get a bill passed at all costs. The fact that he's still backing the public option is good news at this point.

ON CNN's State of the Union, a quick search reveals that John King didn't even ask the president about the public option which shows the state of the media. Why was the public option barely mentioned today? Has the media spoken?

Here's Ed Henry's speculation.

HENRY: But here’s what’s also going to worry the unions, is, if you read between the lines, when you ask, would you sign the Baucus bill if it came to your desk, he said it’s too hypothetical.

But then he walked through -- there were some of the things he likes about the Baucus bill. But I never heard -- if you read between the lines -- “I’m really upset that there’s no public option in the Baucus bill.”

He didn’t really get into that. He’s not fired up about that. And so, when you read the tea leaves, again, he’s not adamant about what the unions want, which is that public option.

KING: He did say in some other interviews that he hopes it’s there in the end and he believes it’s possible to still get it in the end. But he’s not -- you’re certainly right. He’s not saying it has to be there in the end...

HENRY: Right.

KING: ... which is what the unions are saying.

ABC's George Stephanapoulos didn't ask about the public option either.

Here's the only mention I found for it on ABC's THIS WEEK:

BRAZILE: But -- but let me just say this. Bipartisanship was always the goal. When you accept Republican amendments in the House and the Senate and try to bring Republicans aboard, as Chairman Baucus has tried to do, look, he took out the public option to gain Republican support. He -- he gave them interstate marketability.