Arianna Huffington has finally come out of the closet.
 --Huffington's on-air comments and much of the writing on HuffPost have been devoted for months to casting doubt on President Obama generally and on every administration policy and action. Today (Sunday, October 11, 2009), on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Huffington finally comes across much more overtly: She is campaigning against the health care bill.

(Incidentally, Stephanopoulos' dismissal of the Nobel Peace Prize is a disgrace, albeit a tribute of sorts to cultural illiteracy.)

Huffington doesn't put her position that way, of course. As usual, she purports to be supporting a public option. Thus, in a 'round table' discussion also including George F. Will, her line is that a bill called reform is not reform at all. "We did it with education," she points out--rightly. (Neither Huffington nor anyone else allowed to speak on television mentions the Washington Post Co.'s windfall attained through 'No Child Left Behind,' which followed the Post Co.'s acquisition in the late 1990s of Kaplan Learning. What the bill did, as this writer has pointed out before, was boost standardized testing and test-prepping, etc. As one consequence, the Post Co. has by now rebranded itself in SEC filings as an 'education and media company.' So much for the Watergate luster perpetuated in Garry Trudeau's Rick Redfern.)

Huffington does say, overtly, that no public option will be included in a bill. On what evidence, not said. However, her math is off: As previously posted, the "myth of 60" is inaccurate. Democrats do not need 60 votes in the Senate to pass health care legislation. They need 50 votes plus Vice President Joe Biden.

Note: This discussion, and Huffington's categorical claim that no bill coming out of Congress will include a public option, is not uploaded yet. Hope YouTube catches it. The no-you-can't message is pretty clear in context.)

Neither Huffington nor George Stephanopoulos nor anyone else in the ABC round table mentions this legislative math. Generally, btw, this kind of discussion also does not get around to mentioning that the U.S. House has already passed, by solid margins, more than one health care bill that includes a public option.

On health care: Yesterday's Washington Post featured an interesting report by Karl Vick on an existing insurance cooperative. North Dakota's Blues--Blue Cross Blue Shield--originated in populist sentiment, have devolved into Cayman Islands executive 'retreats' and worse including golden parachutes; seems like we've seen this trajectory before. So much for the idea of 'cooperatives' as a substitute for a public option.