#135 Obamacare Update--Sell-Outs in the Senate and Raleigh NC

• Last Friday's post (#133) "What shall it profit ... ?" wasn't meant as a prophecy, but it might as well have been. Sure enough, yesterday's headlines pictured the partners in Big-Med graft, Baucus and Grassley, side-by-side, congratulating themselves on dumping the Public Option from Finance Committee consideration. Recall that these two most powerful members, Chairman and ranking Republican, were also the most heavily endowed by the Pharmaceutical and Insurance industries Not only are these folk on the wrong side of history, they're almost on the wrong side of the law. Doesn't the Senate have an Ethics Committee?

• Meanwhile, as mentioned, President Obama will visit Raleigh's Broughton High School to a "sell-out" crowd tomorrow (it's free, but ticketed in advance) to hold a "Town Hall" forum on Health Care Reform. I just learned why, presumably, he chose this unlikely site. Not so unlikely after all. It is a collegiate looking place, within view of the state capitol, and has hosted Edwards, Gore, Powell, even Helms. But before and because was Martin Luther King's historic 1958 speech on segregation, presented at Broughton to a mixed white/black audience. Appropriate enough, but in that speech he delivered this famous health-based metaphor on the evils of segregation: "It is a cancer on the body politic, and until it is removed our democratic health cannot be realized." A wonderful coincidence, and I wonder if Obama will take some advantage of it. I'll be listening.
  

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