If you indulged in an abundance of Superbeans coffee and were up really late last night, you could watch some of the more dramatic and outrageous moments as televised on CSPAN. An exhausted Harry Reid read letters from some of his sick constituents back home in Nevada who urge passage of this bill as they currently have no health coverage (and slipped up by confusing AARP and the NAACP). Reid reminded the Senate that one person dies every 10 seconds for lack of health care, an obscenity in America. By comparison, the unblinking Minority Leader Mitch McConnell continued to drone on with the usual NeoCon talking points about how expensive the bill was, and how little it will actually accomplish. "If they were proud of this bill they wouldn't be doing it this way." Mitch whined on CNN last night. "They wouldn't be jamming it through in the middle of the night on the last weekend before Christmas."
What an asinine statement. Democrats have been trying to move this legislation since summer, Mitch, and it's your party's obstructionist tactics that kept stalling the process. Like the freakish attempt to block debate on the legislation on Friday by ordering the clerk to read aloud all 383 pages of an amendment to the legislation to an empty chamber, gifting the Senators with a snowy Friday off.
Mitch, naturally, has no problem voting to spend taxpayer dollars on expensive, futile, and deadly legislation to continue Bush's illegal terror wars. Money to help sick and dying Americans? No. Money to help make Americans (and Muslims) dead? Of course!
Between Joe "I've always wanted single-payer, except when I haven't" Lieberman, Bart "pass the coat hanger" Stupak, and Ben "back to the burka" Nelson, it's a wonder anything will come at all of the health care reform we so desperately need in this country. It does appear that the bill will pass the Senate when introduced his Thursday, although it then must be reconciled with the much more liberal House version passed earlier this year.
That's when the New Year's fireworks will really begin.
