KEITH OLBERMANN GIVES SPECTACULAR SPECIAL COMMENT ON HEALTH CARE BILL
  –“Not health, not care, and certainly not reform.” Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown just did a terrific commentary on H.R. 3590. Sad but true. There’s a lot to be sad and true about.

Olbermann also did a really good quick version of political handling, advising Harry Reid to put the public option back in, put the Medicare buy-in back in, and let Lieberman be the one to commit suicide instead of Reid and senate Dems.

Sounds like good advice.

Olbermann also advised President Obama, with quintessential accuracy, that whatever he does is going to ignite the right–so he might as well move the way he wants to. Moving the way they (ostensibly) want him to is going nowhere, politically or otherwise.

Again, good advice. It is tempting to wonder whether anyone in the White House is giving advice equally good, anyone at all; but I don’t want to waste time speculating about personalities. Yet.

Olbermann also had among guests Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), crisp and clear as usual. It is generally reassuring when a politician can actually speak well and can be forceful and sufficiently energetic without getting offensive.

To continue the political thought enunciated by Olbermann: You have already given them enough rope, Mr. President; the GOP and
Lieberman have conclusively proven that bipartisanship is not going to
happen. Cooperation is not going to happen. There was never even the
proverbial ‘honeymoon.’ Get the legislation wished by the people who
elected you, not by the insurance industry.

Back to the Countdown special comment on the health care bill as currently proposed: sadly, Olbermann is right. We just cannot have a mandate forcing Americans to buy porous insurance that doesn’t insure, without strong competition from a public option, without expansion of Medicare, without federal and state insurance regulation with teeth in it. We just cannot have that. “Transfer of wealth” says it best.

This is not to underestimate the obstacles. Some of the broader problems are out there, not to be missed by any observer: the largest media outlets tend to skew pro-corporate and are seemingly incapable of reporting factually on issues such as insurance abuses; the remains of the GOP are dug in, tossing off any ludicrous statement that will get them ink and air time, regardless of destruction; etc.

But solving the problems caused by a horrendous redistribution of wealth upward in previous years will not happen by accelerating the unjust and arbitrary transfer of wealth. The U.S. tax burden was mainly shifted away from the immensely wealthy to the middle class and the working poor years ago. The tax burden was also disproportionately shifted away from corporations to individuals, and onto states and localities. We do not need to fine people for declining to pay 17 percent of their income–according to estimates–to insurance companies that currently are not even held to account clearly for the net/profit on which they should be paying taxes.

Below is the message being circulated by Democracy for America, Gov. Howard Dean’s netroots organizing group, over the signature of Jim Dean. I dearly hope that the predictions expressed are too pessimistic. But they make a lot of sense.
[message follows]