Howard Dean Slugfest with Mary Landrieu

The Dem civil war over health care is getting uglier by the minute. Chris Matthews has the villain of the White House and darling of the progressives, Howard Dean, for a full segment on "Hardball."  Matthews takes Dean to task for opposing the President's health care reform and accuses him of demagoguery when Dean argues reconciliation was the solution to get the public option the left so desires.  After pounding him on this point, Matthews brings Mary (Louisiana Purchase) Landrieu on to debate the merits of the bill as it stands.  Landrieu, whose vote has been dutifully bought sets out to shill for the bill.

Landrieu and Dean go to loggerheads when Landrieu defends the villain of the progressives, Joe Lieberman.   If you are pressed for time the fireworks ensue at 10:00

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White House Official Lays Ultimate Slam on Howard Dean: "He's Irrelevant" The Left is Mostly Baffled

Via Memeorandum
Ooh burn, such a low blow against the champion of the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Savannah Guthrie reveals the anger over health care debate is not reserved for Joe Lieberman but for Howard Dean who in recent days has called for the death of widely despised health care bill.

Mika Brzezinski I won’t name names, but I heard it from several people in the Administration: Howard Dean, very not pleased, with Dr. Dean speaking out about health care reform and this plan.

Savannah Guthrie: Yeah, very irritated. Yes, isn’t it fascinating they don’t seem to be too angry at Lieberman, they’re reserving their fervor for Howard Dean, but actually, one senior official who I talked to this morning paid the highest insult which was to call him irrelevant to the entire health care debate. You know he kind of had his moment in the sun in the last week when this Medicare expansion looked like it was going to be the thing that broke the logjam between the progressives in the party and the moderates, but, of course, because of Lieberman, the Medicare expansion is gone, and now Dean is having what one official called “a tantrum.”

And they think it’s just not helpful, but they say he’s irrelevant because, bottom line is, even though he was meeting yesterday with all the Democrats, a lot of liberals did blow off steam, there’s a lot of frustration, they’re annoyed that the public option is gone, that then they compromised to do the Medicare extension, now it’s gone. At the end of the day, the moderates are holding sway over this bill, but at the end of the day the President’s been able to hold them in line and they think progressives will be with them.

Dean hasn't been shy in his criticism of the current health care bill

"This is a bigger bailout for the insurance industry than AIG," former Democratic National Committee chairman and medical doctor Howard Dean told "Good Morning America's" George Stephanopoulos today. "A very small number of people are going to get any insurance at all, until 2014, if the bill works. "This is an insurance company's dream, this bill," Dean continued. "This is the Washington scramble, and I think it's ill-advised."

Obviously his call to kill the bill has the White House enraged.  Dean's statements reflect the thinking of much of the left wing blogosphere who are baffled by the attitude towards both Dean and Lieberman:

 Joe Lieberman, who held a legislative gun to President Obama's head and threatened to kill all of health care reform, endangering the Democrats' prospects for holding on to control of Congress in the next election and endangering the President's chances at being re-elected, got personally thanked by President Obama yesterday. Thanked for trying to kill health care reform, thanked for shilling for the insurance industry. Howard Dean, who is simply advocating for the President's own campaign promise, is now being dissed by the White House.

Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake explains in a piece written for Politico; it's all about those secret deals the White House made:

Weeping and Wailing from the Whos on Government Health Care

Jeez Louise, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas sends a message on twitter and two major blogs write a post about it.  So, what was so important you ask?

With news the medicare buy-in has been dropped and a really most sincerely dead public option, the progressives are outraged enough they want to kill the bill.  Allapundit notes this was how the 2007 amnesty bill died:

This is how the 2007 amnesty bill died, you may recall. It wasn’t Republicans who killed it, it was Republicans plus big-labor Democrats plus a few pro-amnesty liberal Dems who thought the bill didn’t go far enough. Ultimately, the 60-vote needle was simply too narrow to be threaded. And now here we are again. 

Commenters at Megan McArdles blog are having fun with the news:

 While we enjoy our momentary communion with the nutroots in our mutual disgust towards the loathesome health care legislation, let's not forget there is plenty of government expanding elements left in that bill the White House is determined to pass.   They have 60 senators in a Democratic caucus who have convinced themselves passing something, anything will help them.  They are desperate.

In their desperation to pass anything, however, some pretty awful stuff is being left on the cutting room floor.  What's next to hit the cutting room floor?  The CBO spotted it in it's latest report:

A proposal to require health insurers to provide rebates to their enrollees to the extent that their medical loss ratios are less than 90 percent would effectively force insurers to achieve a high medical loss ratio. Combining this requirement with the other provisions of the PPACA would greatly restrict flexibility related to the sale and purchase of health insurance. In CBO’s view, this further expansion of the federal government’s role in the health insurance market would make such insurance an essentially governmental program, so that all payments related to health insurance policies should be recorded as cash flows in the federal budget.

 Losing medical loss ratios, the public option and the medicare buy just before Christmas;  imagine the despair.  There is going to be some wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Whos down in Whoville who love government health care.  What part of the Roast Beast can we carve next?

JoeMentum: Not Hiding Behind a Public Option Fig Leaf

Joe Lieberman is sticking to his guns on the public option reports Kimberly Strassel in "The Wall Street Journal:"

When Mr. Lieberman says no public option, he means no public option—not an "opt-in" or an "opt out" or a "trigger" (a public option only comes into effect if private insurers fail to spread enough coverage). "We are at the point now where this has become the classic legislative process of trying to get a fig leaf that everyone can hide behind. And I don't want to do that."

Why so adamant, Strassel wonders:

 Mr. Lieberman says that while he is not "a conspiratorial person," he believes the public option is intended as a way for the government to take over health care. "I've been working for health-care reform in different ways since I arrived here," he says. "It was always about how do we make the system more efficient and less costly, and how do we expand coverage to people who can't afford it, and how do we adopt some consumer protections from the insurance companies . . . So where did this public option come from?" It was barely a blip, he says, in last year's presidential campaign.

"I started to ask some of my colleagues in the Democratic caucus, privately, and two of them said "some in our caucus, and some outside in interest groups, after the president won such a great victory and there were more Democrats in the Senate and the House, said this is the moment to go for single payer.'" So, I joke, the senator is, in fact, as big a "conspiracy theorist" as me. He laughingly rejoins: "But I have evidence!"

 Leiberman raises an excellent point, where did this famed public option come from?  The lefty blogs claim it was there all along pressing Lieberman to retract his hateful denial of the beloved public option: