The Hill has an article about Sanjay Gupta and his probable role in promoting Obama's health care legislation which is penned by Ben Goddard. And who is Ben Goddard? Source Watch offers this morsel:
]]>Goddard Claussen is notorious for its "Harry and Louise" advertisement that helped derail President Clinton's 1993 health reform proposal.
WASHINGTON - Key players in the debate over how to provide healthcare coverage for the nation's 47 million uninsured say they view Massachusetts' landmark 2006 law as an important model for what Washington could do and how to get it done.
Check out who Senator Kennedy has been talking to:
]]>All of a sudden Whoever kidnapped Joshua Micah Marshall is floating pseudo scandals. Who is feeding his publication this drivel? We have no way of knowing, but I suspect it is the same anonymous sources who are attacking Pete Stark.
]]>House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee Chairman Pete Stark , D-Calif., never shy about attacking industry profits, also issued a statement slamming the private health plans in Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage plans, for making big money at the expense of taxpayers and health plan enrollees.
Now we know who is going after Pete Stark.
Anonymous Industry Sources Control Congress
I wondered how long it would be before some guy in Bangalore was writing my column about President Obama.
What are the chances that some guy in Bangalore would actually constitute an improvement?
]]>You’ve got to hand it to them. Torture aficionados at the White House and CIA have conned key congressional leaders into insisting not only that torture-lite would be a swell idea, but advocating that the overseers of torture be kept on.
From change-you-can-believe-in, we seem to be slipping back to fear-you-can-trade-on.
It is not just Obama, or even the Intelligence Committees, it is the entire palace of moral bankruptcy that makes this possible.
]]>Surprisingly this Thanksgiving, the Washington Establishment had a lot to give thanks for. And its chief mouthpiece – the Washington Post’s neoconservative editorial page – was glowing over its good fortune in the three-plus weeks since Barack Obama's election.
On Friday, the Post’s lead editorial thanked President-elect Obama for settling on insider favorites for key jobs, especially officials with long records of promoting the neocon foreign policy agenda. ...
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"But Washington has been taking in Obama's victory in its own idiosyncratic way. Hostesses are angling to be the first to entertain the Obamas at their first private dinner in Washington.
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It tells you everything you need to know about the National Cathedral that they would consent to be quoted in such an article. Anything less spiritual would be difficult to imagine.
]]>For your viewing pleasure we have exclusive video of the evening's festivities.
]]>makes a habit of claiming that “wages are shrinking,” working families have lost ground and the country desperately needs his “Rescue Plan for the Middle Class.”
July 14November 4 can't come soon enough.
In the near future we are going to see a great deal of manuvering for power. As a long time observer of Versailles, I thought I would destruct Rahm Emanuel's pathetic manuvering.
]]>On Sunday, ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) whether he would be interested in serving as Obama's chief of staff. Emanuel did not rule it out.
The $700,000 billion financial services industry bailout plan has a critic in Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chairwoman Sheila Bair, who said yesterday the initiative does not do enough to prevent Americans from losing their homes, The Wall Street Journal reported today.
At some point Versailles will work out that the well being of the big shots is connected to the well being of the little guys.
]]>The latest from Steve Clemons: Chuck Hagel Will Help Obama Find his "Inner Nixon".
Clemons says this like it was a good thing. Yeah, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the destruction of Chilean democracy, and so many other things were such a good idea and worked out so well for our country.
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President Bush plans to sign a bill next week that commits the United States to spending about $40 billion over the next five years to fight AIDS overseas, a major expansion of what many consider his most successful foreign policy initiative.
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“On an issue as big and far-reaching as health care reform, you need to be working with real people and you need to have a reach outside the Beltway,” AHIP spokesman Michael Tuffin told Politico in an interview outlining the industry’s strategy. “The issue isn’t going to be settled just by lobbyists in Washington. The American people are going to have their say.”
Projection, thy name is AHIP.
]]>What strikes me about the three quotations I start with above is how they really encapsulate the single-payer problem in the upcoming universal health care debate. Single-payer advocates are often dedicated and strong-willed grassroots activists for their cause - but they are as of now marginalized in the policy discussion, with a public that doesn’t really understand its options. Single-payer advocates have already lost the crucial framing of the current universal health care political debate because as noted the compromises for ’some sort of universal health care’ are what’s on the table - not adherence to single-payer, or we walk away. The time to win the debate was before, or at worst, during the Democratic primary. Part of why single-payer advocates have lost for now, I suspect, is because they lack the resources of “K-Street professionals” and are, as a group, not as experienced or skilled at “building mailing lists and fundraising and get[ting]-out-the vote for November.” Look at Massachusetts’ recent reform, or what happened much earlier in 2002 in Oregon, where single-payer forces lost massively...
Let's look at the assumptions here.
]]>So it’s surprising to see that Broder, who recently took a buyout, but will continue to write his Post column, appears to be a regular presence these days on the business lecture circuit, and has even spoken to major health care groups. Do a Google search and you’ll see that Broder is represented by a number of speaker’s bureaus, including Grabow, which says it is “your David Broder booking agent for private corporate events.”
Broder is identified (in various promotional and other online materials I found) as a featured speaker at events such as these:
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