Now, politics is the art of the possible. Mr. Obama was never going to get everything his supporters wanted.

But there’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness, and progressives increasingly feel that the administration is on the wrong side of that line. It seems as if there is nothing Republicans can do that will draw an administration rebuke: Senator Charles E. Grassley feeds the death panel smear, warning that reform will “pull the plug on grandma,” and two days later the White House declares that it’s still committed to working with him.

It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

Indeed, no sooner were there reports that the administration might accept co-ops as an alternative to the public option than G.O.P. leaders announced that co-ops, too, were unacceptable.

So progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it. And now he needs to win it back.

Paul Krugman | NYTimes.com

This is how things always work.  The industry interests which own and control our government always get their way.  When is the last time they didnt?  The ”public option” was something that was designed to excite and placate progressives who gave up from the start on a single-payer approach – and the vast, vast majority of progressives all but the most loyal Obama supporters who are invested in this issue have been emphatic about how central a public option is to their support for health care reform.

But it seems clear that the White House and key Democrats were always planning on negotiating it away in exchange for industry support.  Isnt that how it always works in Washington?  No matter how many Democrats are elected, no matter which party controls the levers of government, the same set of narrow monied interests and right-wing values dictate outcomes, even if it means running roughshod over the interests of ordinary citizens securing lower costs and expanding coverage and/or what large majorities want.

Glenn Greenwald | Salon.com

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.

For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it.

Thus it arises that on every opportunity for attacking the reformer, his opponents do so with the zeal of partisans, the others only defend him half-heartedly, so that between them he runs great danger.

Machiavelli | from “The Prince”, quoted in Salon

If we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route. True “socialized medicine” would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.

But a Swiss-style system of universal coverage would be a vast improvement on what we have now. And we already know that such systems work.

So we can do this. At this point, all that stands in the way of universal health care in America are the greed of the medical-industrial complex, the lies of the right-wing propaganda machine, and the gullibility of voters who believe those lies.

Paul Krugman | NYTimes.com

Health reform is in danger of failing because the focus has been too much on who is covered and not enough on what is covered. Health care reform is primarily about health insurance reform, with the main battle being over coverage and the payment system.

Of course, we need to provide coverage for the 48 million Americans who do not have health insurance. It is morally indefensible that we have not already done so.

But we also need to transform what is covered. If we want to make affordable health care available to the 48 million Americans who do not have health insurance, then the fundamental causes of many chronic diseases need to be addressed — which are primarily the lifestyle choices we make each day — rather than only literally or figuratively bypassing them.

Dr. Dean Ornish | Common Dreams

Lets face the harsh reality — Obama has blown health care reform, big time. The opportunity of a lifetime has been squandered. The most recent revelations about backroom deals with Pharma and the other vendors of medical services drops the curtain on any hope of serious change in our costly and inefficient non-system. This is a painful admission to make. Not only does the country remain handicapped by grossly sub-par arrangements for health delivery, we also are burdened with a president who has been discredited as a progressive dedicated to a betterment of how we conduct public business.

Michael Brenner | Huffington Post

The week past, some so-called “conservative” political action groups read: brownshirts pimped by corporate medical interests trumped up a few incidents of civil unrest at “town meetings” around the country, ostensibly to counter health care reform ideas. The people behind these capers may be playing with dynamite. Its one thing to yell at a congressman over “single payer” abstractions.  Itll be another thing when the dispossessed and repossessed Palin worshippers, Nascar morons, and Jesus Jokers haul the ordnance out of their closets and start tossing Molotov cocktails into the First  National Bank of Chiggerville.

James Howard Kunstler | Clusterfuck Nation

What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

No president can do that alone, let alone in six months. To make Obama’s goal more quixotic, the ailment that he diagnosed is far bigger than Washington and often beyond politics’ domain. What disturbs Americans of all ideological persuasions is the fear that almost everything, not just government, is fixed or manipulated by some powerful hidden hand, from commercial transactions as trivial as the sales of prime concert tickets to cultural forces as pervasive as the news media…..

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy. If anything, the most unexpected — and challenging — event that could rock the White House this August would be if the opposition actually woke up.

Frank Rich | NYTimes.com

Sarah Palin or her handlers posted a message on Facebook decrying the “death panels” she says – wrongly, bizarrely, viciously — Obamas health care reform will establish. She also claimed such panels might well have ended the life of her son Trig, born with Downs Syndrome.

Where to start? It would be funny if it werent so sad, and if Palin wasnt a contender for the Republican nomination in 2012 trust me, she is too unhinged to prevail, but shell get a lot of attention. Palins entire statement is so ignorant, so bollixed rhetorically and morally, it hurts to read it. The next time any Republican apologist tries to claim the “town hell” turnouts are spontaneous, lets remind them: OK, sure, its spontaneous alright; spontaneous combustion super-ignited by the most stupid and divisive lies weve seen in a long time.

But looking at history, maybe its not that long a time since weve seen this level of fact-free right-wing hysteria. The 2008 Democratic primary was painful to me because even as some liberals were trashing the Clintons and their “baggage,” it should have been clear to anyone with a memory that Obama would face the same insanity they did – accusations they murdered Vince Foster, trafficked in drugs, and then, of course, the sexual witch hunt known as impeachment. It was clear Democrats should take the character assassination the Clintons suffered, and multiply it by at least 10 for Obama, given his race. It was all fairly predictable; and it can all be fought — and will be fought — but even now, a lot of Democrats appear dull and flat-footed and unprepared for the GOP hate spewing from so many sewers.

Joan Walsh | Salon.com