…the Saints did play like champions.  And it was a pretty damn good game right up until the end. After that interception, though, you could tell the Colts were rattled.  Peyton Manning especially.  That was the nail in the coffin right there, except it was the Colts and they’ve pulled back from worse brinks before.

I enjoyed the game.  I don’t watch much in the way of sports, but I do love a good football game.  On that note – anyone here read any good sports-bloggers?

Oh, and I knew this ad would get some blog-traction today.

For a slightly more dystopian take, read this.  Given the state of affairs we’re in over the growing and consumption of certain illicit plants this is not so far-fetched.  And if it is far-fetched, then so is the war on drugs.  So is the light-bulb ban.

My favorite ad – probably the stuff from Doritos.  I laughed the hardest when that kid slapped the guy for taking his chip.

And I’m pretty excited about the new Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie, which I hadn’t heard anything about until last night.  I was a big fan of Gladiator and I’ve always been big on Robin Hood stories.  I remember seeing Kevin Costner’s version when I was ten, in a movie theater in Florida.  The audience cheered after Morgan Freeman’s speech.  Yes, those were simpler times.  I still have a soft-spot for that movie, warts and all.  I mean, who cares about the accent?  If anything, Costner’s performance led directly to some really good lines in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

You can have an open-thread here if y’all would like….

P.S. – I’m with Sonny Bunch (in the comments) on this one – to some degree.  I think the ad was a parody of enviro-extremism, but I also think it didn’t take seriously the question of the security state.  In other words, while it parodied the green movement, it laughed off the very real threat of the creeping security state, which can use green policies as easily as it can use marijuana or terrorism to grow and further intrude upon our privacy.

Opponents of high speed rail make several points about its viability: rail is a “19th century” mode of transportation; rail would be under-used and therefore would need massive subsidies to function; infrastructure in the cities connected by high speed rail is not sufficient to make this form of transportation efficient or cost-effective; even if rail is eventually necessary, right now it is impractical due to the ready supply of cheap oil.  Others point to the fact that the contracts for these rail systems will largely go to foreign companies, thus raising questions about their stimulative effects here at home.

I think these are all very good arguments.  And if we had an endless supply of oil and gas, and thus an endless source of cheap fossil fuels for our car-culture, I think that they would be good enough arguments to discourage any support of federal high speed rail projects.  However at some point I believe we will be short enough on fuel that it will become cost-prohibitive to commute or travel long distances in cars.  Having a rail infrastructure in place at that point will be instrumental in shifting toward a less car-driven economy. Local efforts to remake cities along more pedestrian and mass-transit lines can be more focused since the big inter-city travel routes will be developed already.

Of course there are difficulties. Rail suffers the same disadvantage alternative energy suffers: that is, heavily subsidized fossil fuels and a modern infrastructure built entirely around the use of fossil fuels make any effort to compete nearly impossible – at least not without further subsidies.  Removing subsides for fossil fuels could help level the playing field, but I don’t see that happening ever really. No politician wants that blood on their hands.  Nor do I see a sensible carbon tax replacing the silly and probably doomed attempt at cap and trade.

Via Andrew, Jonathan Bernstein thinks the Democrats should pass the bill regardless of the public’s distaste for the process:

Reconciliation is thirty years old, and there’s nothing at all wrong with using it to pass legislation.  What’s more, pass and patch (or pass-then-patch) involves passing health care reform through perfectly normal, regular, procedures — and then fixing the original bill through reconciliation.  Now, granted, Republicans are apt to complain about procedure, and it’s true that Americans don’t like partisan squabbles and don’t like hearing about procedure.  But once the bill is passed, it seems very likely that the national press will tire of procedural complaints about a bill passed weeks, and then months, ago.

Second, it’s a real mistake for Democrats to worry too much about how Republicans will portray things that they do.  Republicans are naturally going to bash Democrats for everything; should Democrats respond by doing nothing?  Surely not.  Democrats should do things that they believe are good for the nation.  Democrats believe that health care reform is good for the nation.  They are, like it or not, going to be attacked for health care reform. Those who get their information only from Republican news sources will believe those attacks — but people who get their information only from those sources are not swing voters.

Regardless of my own feelings about this bill – which are mixed, to say the least – I think Bernstein is correct.  The electorate has a short memory. Tangible results stick in that memory far more than abstract procedures. Six months after the bill is passed, most Americans will still not know what reconciliation is, which deals were struck, and so forth, but a healthy portion of voters will know that healthcare reform succeeded (for now).  More Americans will be glad to hear that an end to pre-existing conditions clauses has been hammered out then will become emotionally revved up over the Democrat’s handling of the process.  It’s possible that the bill will remain unpopular, but it’s hard to see how giving up entirely will look any better for the Democrats.

That being said, I don’t think the Democrats have what it takes to push this thing through reconciliation or patch it up after passing it in the House.  Unlike their opponents, the Democrats have very lackluster party discipline.  The centrists are already calling a halt, and the progressives in the House seem unwilling to pass the Senate bill because it’s too conservative for their taste.  The president hasn’t taken much of a leadership role either, and so the bill remains in legislative purgatory.  My guess is that Keith Hennessey is correct, and the bill is dead. 

Perhaps legislators can come back with more modest proposals in the future, but I imagine it will be far in the future.  While I would love to see market reforms in the health insurance market, I don’t believe that Republicans are very serious even about their own ideas.  This is largely the basis for my own support of the Democrats’ bill.  While there are certainly libertarians and conservatives with alternative proposals for healthcare reform, Republican leadership has historically been against any changes to the status quo.  I don’t think the status quo is sustainable.  If the bill dies, I’m not really sure what we can expect.  If I thought the Republicans would take up the cause of a bill like Wyden-Bennett and join ranks with Democrats to push something through as an alternative, I would be more optimistic.  As it stands, every outcome looks grim.  Healthcare costs in the public and private sector continue to rise unsustainably, and our system is too broken to do anything about it.

P.S. Reconciliation is not necessarily a budget-restricted procedure, however due to the Byrd rule that is now the case.  However, anyone who thinks that the budget and healthcare reform are not inextricably linked needs to talk to Paul Ryan about the matter.  Healthcare is the budget, and without addressing it we will never be able to right this fiscal ship.

Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians.  I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well.  Jonah writes:

My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written about this a zillion times). The Right is divided between those who are (in Irving Kristol’s formulation) anti-left and those who are anti-State. Those who believe that the government is bad because it’s working from leftist assumptions, and those who believe that the government is bad because it is the government. (Most conservatives share both outlooks to one extent or another, but usually fit more into one camp than the other. If you’re wholly in the government-is-bad camp you’re more properly a libertarian, but still on the right). There are those who believe that liberty is an end and those who believe that liberty is a means. For more than a half century now, modern conservatives have been debating and redebating the question of where to the draw the lines between freedom and order, liberty and virtue. And because that line continually needs to be redrawn given the evolution of attitudes, changes in technology, etc, conservative intellectuals (though not necessarily conservative activists, politicians and the like) are constantly revisiting first principles and philosophical assumptions or are at least capable of acknowledging the good faith of their philosophical opponents). I do not think you can say the same thing about liberals (again, as a wild generalization). What unites most, if not all, factions of the Left, from socialists to DLC moderates is a dogmatic acceptance that the government should do good when it can and where it can.  Hence the debates on the left tend to be procedural, wonkish, and technical or rankly political. The Right has such arguments as well, of course. But they do not define and dominate political discussions the way they do on the left. And that’s because our dogma is still unsettled.

I think this strikes upon a number of smart observations.  Certainly the continual re-drawing of the many lines between liberty and virtue, freedom and order, etc. is exactly the reason I enjoy reading (intellectual) conservative blogs so much more than I enjoy reading liberal blogs.  On the flip side, I think the best wonkish blogs and writers are found in the liberal corner.

Perhaps this reveals not only the strengths on both sides of the political aisle, but also the weaknesses.

I like thinking of conservatism in these terms – as an “unsettled ideology.” This gets at the bohemian conservatism I was talking about last week.  Russell Kirk was a self-described “bohemian Tory” and I think the intellectual wing of the conservative movement, with its distrust of centralized power and so forth fits that term nicely, if the red-meat activist wing does not.  The “unsettled dogma” concept seems so far removed from the conservative movement’s attempts at purity tests and activism that it’s a bit hard to reconcile the two.  And of course I’ve always been more attracted to the intellectual struggles within the ideology than with the political processes themselves, healthcare blogging notwithstanding.  But I think this can also be a trap for conservative intellectuals, or at least for bloggers with an intellectual streak (I am not really an intellectual as far as I know). More conservatives need to focus on policy and wonkishness if only to provide their ideas with a tangible foundation, but also because the effort to dismantle or reinvent the welfare state – to really limit big government – requires if anything even more policy and wonkishness than the other side.

Addendum: I’d like to point out that I in no way endorse some of the more caricatured views Goldberg expresses here vis-a-vis liberals.  Gross generalizations are not really my cup of tea, whether they can be applied to certain people within the larger group or not.  I will, however, note that so far the conservative and liberal response here has been hostile.  That means I’m doing something right.  Re: purity tests and so forth, it’s not so much that ideological groups shouldn’t set out some standards for membership, but that the standards become awfully silly and rigid in a political climate like the one we now have.

Matt Yglesias likens transparency in Congressional negotiations with transparency in family negotiations:

Think about a family negotiation over whose house you spend the holidays at, or who goes to watch Billy’s soccer game on Saturday. At the end of the day, wouldn’t everyone be worse off if the whole extended clan had the right to watch the negotiation on C-SPAN? More to the point, wouldn’t knowledge that the proceedings were going to be seen by others bias the negotiation. If your husband says “you don’t even like your cousin John” then you more or less have to protest and insist that you do too like him and any proposal predicated on the idea that you don’t like him needs to be rejected.

And that’s how it would go in negotiations. I think people think that if there were more transparency, the dread special interests would have less hold over the process. But I suspect the real result would be the reverse. What happens when you reach a compromise is both sides agree to sell some folks out in pursuit of some bigger objective they care more about. But in a transparent process, nobody would be willing to even hypothetically entertain the idea of selling anybody out.

Ezra Klein adds:

Of course, if the whole clan was watching, the husband would never mention your antipathy to your cousin John. And that’s the bigger problem: Hard issues never get discussed at all. You’d have some private talk and then some fake public negotiations where you followed a predetermined conversational route to the ending you settled on behind closed doors.

Now, this is true to an extent.  One significant difference between family negotiations and government negotiations is the set of incentives.  There are no lobbyists when a husband and wife decide where to spend Christmas (unless you count the kids or the competing relatives).  Nor is there typically a great deal of money at stake. And while family negotiations are typically quite personal, government negotiations are not.  Obviously hashing out disagreements about our family members is not something we want to do in public because, at the end of the day, we’d like to maintain some ties with even those family members who we may be complaining about.  These same deep bonds simply don’t exist in the public policy arena.  So it is not merely a difference of scope but a difference of kind which causes this analogy to fall apart.

Would lobbyists and government officials simply negotiate behind closed doors prior to negotiating in public as Ezra suggests?  Probably.  However, there are other ways to make the process more transparent.  Even if negotiations remain behind closed doors, certainly the results of these transactions could be made more visible.  Certainly there could be a better way to publicly advertise who is being lobbied by whom.

This is the information age after all.  The trick isn’t a lack of information – the trick is distributing that information and making it as easy to understand for as many people as possible. 

A simple solution would be to treat our congressmen (and women) like NASCAR drivers.  Simply stick a bunch of sponsor logos and industry stickers all over them so that we can see that when Congressman A votes for more farm subsidies, it’s because Big Agriculture is paying him to.  Or when Senator Y votes against defense cuts, it’s because [insert weapons manufacturer here] has donated to his re-election fund.  Have their staffers do the same.  Have each bill enacted in Congress prefaced with a "This bill is brought to you by…." credits section.

And so on and so forth.  There are plenty more ways (and even some not-tongue-in-cheek ways) to make the connections between our representatives and the special interests they represent more obvious and accessible.  Not all special interest influence is necessarily bad either – but it’s good to know who is at least ostensibly pulling the strings – and how hard.

“If Obama’s efforts to create a viable regulatory framework in which individuals can buy private health insurance (a) pass congress, and (b) turn out to work well and be popular, then you can imagine a version of Ryan’s plan being put into place. But in the absence of that kind of reform, I just don’t see how you can do this, which is presumably why the implementation is delayed all the way to 2021 which helps Ryan avoid needing to think about implementation details.” ~ Matt Yglesias, writing about Rep. Paul Ryan’s alternative budget

I think Yglesias actually makes a pretty strong point here.  While I’m overall fairly sympathetic to Ryan’s budget – he does, after all, balance it (at least according to the CBO report [pdf]), something virtually no other politician is willing to even propose – I think there is a fundamental flaw with implementing a healthcare voucher program without first fixing the broken, dysfunctional health insurance market.  The exchanges created in Obamacare would be one way to do this. 

What Yglesias does not point out, however, is that Ryan’s budget proposal also puts an end to the tax exemption for employee benefits.  Simply coupling this tax reform with the ability to purchase insurance across state lines creates an entirely new health insurance market.  Suddenly people on the individual market are given the same tax preference as people who receive their insurance from an employer.  Health insurance drifts away from employers and becomes personal and portable.  People wouldn’t lose coverage when they left their jobs.  Meanwhile, insurers would lose their long-held local and state monopolies and be forced to compete nationally, driving down costs both through added competitive pressures and by the better bargaining powers that these large, national firms would have, with their much larger, national cost-sharing pools.

Of course, the hard questions in healthcare will center around two inextricably linked concepts – pre-existing conditions clauses, and individual mandates.  Almost all modern democracies have some form of universal coverage, and the only way that it has been achieved with any semblance of a free market has been by doing away with pre-existing conditions clauses and implementing some sort of individual mandate.  If the former is done without the latter, nobody would buy insurance until they were sick – defeating the purpose (and the viability) of insurance to begin with.

Other alternatives exist, of course.  My personal preference is a model along the lines of Singapore’s healthcare system, which mandates health savings accounts and then picks up the tab on any costs above a certain flat percentage of income.  This puts healthcare directly in the hands of the consumer (cutting out insurance companies altogether) and provides them with catastrophic coverage if something should go wrong.  Furthermore, by placing costs and transactions directly in the consumers hands, it keeps costs from skyrocketing.  The mandated savings would be flat, but the catastrophic coverage functions progressively, covering less and less as income rises.

Either way, before any privatization of Medicare and Medicaid can occur, the private insurance market must be transformed.  Paul Ryan has shown true grit in crafting a budget that is actually balanced, but the possibility of backlash to cuts in entitlements is very real if the systemic problems in our healthcare system aren’t taken care of first.  Both Yglesias and Ezra Klein see this budget as a sort of draconian rationing of benefits for seniors and poorer Americans. If the insurance market could actually be fixed, however, then the system of vouchers which Ryan proposes would be adequate and possibly even better alternatives to the status quo.

While I do think that the success or failure of healthcare reform rests squarely on the shoulders of the Democrats in Congress and with the president, I still wish that Republicans would come aboard with some reasonable compromises. At this point, though, the Democrats have several options on the table and while I think there is reasonable room for compromise they could always….

….pass a healthcare reform bill via reconciliation. Yes, the Byrd rule makes this tricky. Serious holes could be shot through the bill. But it can be done. Democrats should seriously consider this approach given the continued strength of their majorities in both the House and the Senate. Whatever is cut out during the process can be added back in later. Rather than worrying so much about public opinion should they pass the bill in the wrong way, Democrats should worry about public opinion if the bill fails altogether. That’s a lot more memorable then some abstract legislative process with as benign sounding a title as “reconciliation.” But…

…if reconciliation is too daunting, Democrats could take a Republican bill and remake it into a bipartisan bill – rather than the other way around. Market and tort reforms could be coupled with subsidies (or vouchers) and some broadly popular reforms like an end to pre-existing condition clauses and some sort of optional national exchange. All the reforms I mention below could be packaged together as one bigger bill. Or…

….the Democrats could do this incrementally, with smaller moves and compromises made one at a time – in three or four separate bills over the course of a year or two or three.

First: expand Medicaid to 200% of poverty while at the same time deregulating the insurance market so that insurers could sell insurance across state lines. Shift the regulatory burden from the states to the federal government to avoid the same problems we’ve seen in the credit card industry. Finally, have the federal government pick up the tab for the Medicaid expansion.

In the next bill, introduce an excise tax on “Cadillac plans” while at the same time tackling tort reform. Toss in some vouchers (subsidies) for low-income families to purchase private health insurance. The Cadillac tax will eventually hit enough people to start a shift away from employee-based health benefits. In the future, the vouchers can be adjusted as more and more people leave the current system to purchase personal, portable insurance.

Third, lower the age of Medicare recipients to 50 while at the same time introducing significant means-testing. Change the fee-for-service model to one which relies on results rather than services rendered. In other words, have a Medicare bill that adds more healthy, younger people to the pool, while reducing benefits and/or raising premiums for wealthier elderly while at the same time changing the biggest and most fundamental flaw with how service providers are paid.

Somewhere in here pass a VAT. Put a bunch of money into community health centers, and nursing programs. Deregulate the medical cartels allowing more barefoot doctors, nurse practitioners, and midwives to provide more of our health services. Let low-cost, easy access, for-profit medical centers set up in shopping malls and other easy access places. Make sure Medicaid is accepted at these new walk-in clinics. Let Wal*Mart run them from its stores, all across the country. Let people start tax-deductible HSA’s regardless of the their health insurance.

And so on and so forth. Plenty can be done – even incrementally – to enact change in the status quo. Things can get better for people without enacting sweeping change that scares voters and kills the process in its tracks.

I have a confession to make.

I did not watch the President’s speech last night. 

No, after putting our daughter down to bed I did not turn on the computer.  I did not watch or listen to our Commander in Chief and his stirring oratorical skills.  I missed the Alito scandal altogether. I didn’t even check Memeorandum.

I turned, instead, to that most archaic of inventions: the novel.  I am currently midway through the third of Steven Erikson’s oh-so-epic Malazan books, Memories of Ice, and I admit that learning more about the mysterious Pannion Domin and the Crippled God sounded far more interesting to me than another of the President’s rhetorical masterpieces. Perhaps this is because I have had my fill of Obama’s grand speeches (since about the 4th of November, 2008).  Not that he’s a bad speaker – far from it – but because they become somewhat predictable after a while, no matter which president it is.

Or perhaps it’s just that I’m the sort of person who becomes lost easily in a good story.  (I used to bring a book with me to college basket-ball games as a kid and read through the entire game.  And I played basketball. So….)  Either way, last night the book won out over the speech.  I know, I know…  Shame on the blogger who would skip the SOTU address to read a book – and not just any book, not some literary triumph, but a fantasy novel.  It doesn’t get much lower than that.  Of course, I almost never watch anything in the first place – especially not on politics – so this is really nothing new.

And it is a very good book/series.  Any fantasy reader who’s still hung up on George R. R. Martin not finishing his Song of Fire and Ice books (or at least not very quickly) should check it out.

ADDENDUM: Consider this an open thread.

One problem with conservatism today is that conservatives are living in a past in which tax cuts were a panacea.  Thattimes have changed does not seem to register, and so new ideas are few and far between.  At some point, more and more conservatives will start thinking like Bruce Bartlett – not necessarily in favor of higher corporate or income taxes (hopefully) but in favor of something like a VAT – because there is simply no way we can cut spending enough to fix the budget.  The political will simply doesn’t exist.  We need a multi-pronged approach, tackling debt, spending, and revenue all at once, and we need serious politicians on the left and the right to do that.  (The tax-the-rich crowd on the left is just as bad as the cut-taxes crowd on the right, ignoring the (un)employment implications that such punitive taxes inevitably entail especially with unemployment in the double-digits.  Certainly raising taxes in the midst of a recession is a very bad idea.)

Another problem with conservatism in its current form is that defense has become so sacrosanct that true, limited government will never be realized.  Entitlements are out of control, but the growth and imperviousness of our defense budget is worse.  This is where I come down (among many other things) on the libertarian side of the aisle.

Meanwhile liberalism, while often the most egalitarian of these ideologies (to grossly generalize, of course) and certainly appealing to people who want to help the poor and to fix the manifold problems with society, too often relies upon the beneficence of the state, of experts and their expertise, and on central planning to achieve its grand (and expensive) designs.

And I guess I don’t trust the experts, even when I find their arguments compelling and even convincing.  And I don’t trust the planners even when the plan sounds pretty good – at least not any more than I trust the nation builders and their militaristic optimism, no matter how much better their nation-to-be sounds than the nation-that-is.  At the end of the day I think the best plan is always the one which allows for the least amount of planning, the one which can unfold organically, the one that allows competition and choice to flourish, and which relies upon local communities and private enterprise rather than Peter Orszag and the Planning Committee.  Ditto that for our foreign policy.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need a government or an army or that any and every action of the state is bad. It just means that we need to find ways to do it through limited government rather than putting so much faith in that institution time and again always with the same disappointing results.

We should be moving toward competitive federalism, not toward further centralization in Washington D.C.  Such centralizing of power is unsustainable at best.  But conservatives should also be distancing themselves from too much market-speak (a curse and a blessing for libertarians and conservatives), from too much of the dispassionate conservatism that defines so much of the movement today, and embrace the spirit that comes along with decentralization and its dismissal of big power in whatever form it takes. (Free trade certainly does end oligopolies and concentration of entrenched powers-that-be, but somehow talking about it too much makes people think quite the opposite.)

Such a spirit, I would argue, is rather more bohemian in nature.  And perhaps there is a streak of this bohemian self-reliance animating the tea parties, or perhaps there could be.  A conservatism that means what it says when it touts family values by understanding the family in terms of its relation to the larger community; and which understands that the power of the self-reliant individual rests as much on those things which support and surround him as upon his own natural talents.

I’ve been a little too hard on conservatives lately – largely due, I think, to my overall frustrations over healthcare reform, but also because of the antics on the right which I find distasteful and discouraging.  Part of what draws me to conservatism is its respect for tradition, restraint and of course the conservative disposition (which I realize is awfully vague and fairly apolitical).  This includes not saying wildly outlandish things or using scare tactics to make your case.  Somewhere along the way, all this has been tossed aside, along with many conservative principles such as limited government (i.e. not “save Medicare from the Democrats”).  Loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck dominate the conservative airwaves, and the GOP itself is headed by the inept Michael Steele.  Several weeks ago, after watching that horrible Colbert segment with Andy Schlafly, I let myself sink into despair.

The conservative movement – nay, conservatism itself – was dead (to me, or so I thought).  Or, if not dead, it was damn near.  Andy Schlafly and Sean Hannity were dancing on its grave sputtering nonsense about Jesus and the free market, giving anti-capitalist progressives all the ammunition they’d ever need to spout their own brand of crazy-passionate-yet-uninformed.  What little remained of conservatism’s once robust intellectual movement seemed cordoned off, populated by a few economists, a handful of paleocons and dissidents, and some libertarians.  The neocon’s secret mission to destroy the movement from the inside out was working – had worked.  Game over.

Then came the special election in Massachusetts.  The Scott Brown victory, if nothing else, has restored my faith in the possibility of Big Tent conservatism.  Whatever Brown’s flaws or inconsistencies – and like every politician, they are many – he nevertheless represents a shift away from vapid purity tests and toward a more regionally representative Republican party.  The lesson of the Brown victory is not that moderate/liberal Republicans should be the model for conservative candidates country-wide, but that there should be no status quo at all – no precise model for what works, no one-size-fits-all-conservatism. What works in Tennessee will likely not work in New Yrok (nor should one politician attempt to change their political views entirely to appeal to each of these states consecutively).

Furthermore, Republicans should run more broadly appealing candidates rather than hyper-partisan ones, even if the hyper-partisan candidates are the best at rousing the base.  Republicans can still run very conservative candidates so long as those candidates can speak to a wide swath of voters. – Bob McDonnell in Virginia, for instance, is just this sort of candidate.

Moreover, the liberal reaction to Citizens United (Glenn Greenwald notwithstanding) has made me realize that my recent lack of faith in conservatives/conservatism is more a reflection of my overall lack of faith in humanity/politics. People on both sides of the aisle enforce that lack of faith on a daily basis.  Liberals and progressives can be just as over the top, emotional, and absurd as their conservative and libertarian counterparts.

On the other hand, all these groups can be well-intentioned and simply disagree fundamentally on very core principles and ideas. That disagreement exists does not make one side more wicked than the other. Obstructing the majority’s agenda is not in and of itself wrong. For instance, Republicans actually did compromise on healthcare reform.  Quite a few of them backed the Wyden/Bennett bill which was a much better bill than the one the Senate eventually produced. Big Labor was the lurking opposition to that bill’s passage, and guess who happens to be situated deep in the pockets of Big Labor?

Hint: it’s not the Republicans.