have a peaceful day,
Bill

This is per rasmussen reports.com

Last week, Rasmussen Reports tracking found that support for the Congressional plan was at 42%.

While the tracking question did not specifically mention the public option, it referred to the bill proposed by the president and congressional Democrats now working its way through Congress. All of the congressional committees that had passed reform legislation included a government health insurance plan. Therefore, it is reasonable to compare those results with the current polling to measure the potential impact of dropping the public option.

The most dramatic impact is a sharp decline in enthusiastic support. Without the public option, only nine percent (9%) Strongly support the legislation. The earlier poll found 26% Strongly in favor of it.

That enthusiasm gap is especially significant since the percentage of those opposed to the legislation has consistently been higher. Last week’s poll found 44% Strongly opposed to the reform legislation. If the public option is dropped, 37% remain Strongly opposed.

I am so weary of these wimpy Democrats and all of the excuses. Filibuster? I am old enough to remember when some filibusters did occur; it had to do with civil rights and did not convey the smell of roses upon those who did it. Fear of filibuster? I don’t think so. More like yet another excuse for not giving “we the peeps” what we want.

We want a comprehensive national healthcare program and we have no use for the insurance companies who have been screwing us over for years.

Don’t start with a position of many compromises. Hang tough. You just might get it. Citizens of all of the other industrialized, and even some “third world” countries have succeeded. You deserve a heathcare system that guarantees and pays for your healthcare as a human right, just because you exist!

Whether you believe it or not, here’s an excerpt from an AP news item today. i left out the rest because I thought it was just punditry:

A new CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 53 percent of Americans disapproved of Obama’s handling of health care, while 44 percent approved. In March, far more people had approved than disapproved.

In a Kaiser Health Tracking Poll in August, 40 percent said they favored passing some sort of health care revision this year, a dramatic drop from 62 percent in June.

Conceding that opponents have the momentum, Democratic leaders plan a round of big and small meetings in the Capitol next week, focusing on moderate senators and House members from competitive districts who fear that voting for a sweeping bill could cost them the next election. Liberal groups have held hundreds of events in a bid to show that a robust overhaul is more popular than August’s news reports would suggest.

Of course, the bill is still in committee, so you could say until it comes to the floor there nothing to discuss. But if thats the case what’s all the media heat and smoke about? Mostly what I see is just political sniping by various factions.

The argument of a “small vocal minority” is usually used by conservatives to describe “progressive” positions, so its interesting that it comes up in this context. Everyone claims to representative of the “true” majority when theres vocal protests against a process with momentum.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

To quote from a rather famous movie line . . . What we have here is a failure to communicate! The public has not succeeded in making it clear to these fringe fools that they need to negotiate instead of obstructing and if they are incapable of that they need to get out of the way.