Free Republic

Extremist elements of the party railed and rioted against the alleged moderation of their candidate. The result was an overthrow of the local party establishment and an exciting three-way election in which the extremists were ultimately defeated. This is not about events in 2009 when liberal upstate New York Republican Dede Scozzafava was handed her party's nomination and faced a conservative opponent in what has become an infamous congressional special election. It refers, rather, to the 2006 race in which the angry Left tried to end Connecticut Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman's career. The episode is especially relevant now that Lieberman...

The scuttling of the public option from the Senate health care bill has infuriated organized labor and left their leaders in a bind about how to proceed. Top labor officials of several unions are meeting with their executives today, and some plan to meet on Thursday, to devise their strategies, now that the Senate has dropped the public option, a government-run health insurance plan to compete with private insurers. It was the central provision for which labor has been fighting. A sense of urgency was building, as a deadline bears down on the Senate. In order to pass a bill...

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) backed out of an event with other organizations promoting the Senate healthcare reform bill Wednesday over concerns about changes made to the legislation to accommodate centrist Democrats. The SEIU had planned to participate in a Capitol Hill press conference along with the AARP, the liberal advocacy group Families USA, Consumers Union and the American Cancer Society Action Network. As recently as Tuesday morning, the organizations distributed an advisory to the news media that included the SEIU. But the move by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to excise provisions of the healthcare reform bill...

Politico: “The Senate version is not worth passing,” former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean told POLITICO, referring to plans to strip the latest compromise from the bill, a Medicare buy-in. “I think in this particular iteration, this is the end of the road for reform.” Is this for real folks? Has Deam turned from the dark side into the light or are they up to something else? Rest assured, no and yes! Dean's comments are about four minutes into this clip:

New from NakedEmperor

In a blow to the bill grinding through the Senate, Howard Dean bluntly called for the bill to be killed in a pre-recorded interview set to air later this afternoon, denouncing it as “the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate,” the reporter who conducted the interview tells me. Dean said the removal of the Medicare buy-in made the bill not worth supporting, and urged Dem leaders to start over with the process of reconciliation in the interview, which is set to air at 5:50 PM today on Vermont Public Radio, political reporter Bob Kinzel confirms to...

Here is video of Howard Dean on CBS This Morning saying it is really "irrelevant" whether or not the Senate Health Care Bill has a "public option." For Dean, what matters is that it "moves things forward," and moves in the right direction. Essentially, Dean admits he does care whether this bill has a "public option" because the passage of any kind of Democrat Health Care Bill will eventually lead to what they really are after - a Government takeover of Health Care. They just want to get the "foot in the door," and later they can add to it...

A major threat is developing to Barack Obama's dream of universal health care...and surprisingly, it comes from the left. After acceding to all of independent Joe Lieberman's demands, including nixing the public option and the early Medicare buy-in, progressives are in an uproar. They have already lost a lot of faith in this President on other issues, most importantly the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But they thought they had a true believer in the Oval Office. If Obama is a true believer, he surely isn't fighting for his beliefs.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- On a day when Democrats emerged triumphantly from a meeting with President Barack Obama appearing to have won the vote of Joe Lieberman for their pro-abortion health care bill, they may not be ready to celebrate yet. The Lieberman vote appeared to allow Democrats and Obama to secure 59 votes. The only holdout left appeared to be pro-life Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska who says he won't vote for the bill because it funds abortions. Political observers need to hang on to their hats because pro-abortion Sen. Rolland Burris of Illinois, ironically the lawmakers appointed to...

According to all reports Sen. Harry Reid has caved to Lieberman and will now cut out pretty much everything important to liberals in ObamaCare to get him on board and get this POS passed. Reporting from Washington - Senate Democratic leaders, scrambling for the 60 votes they need to pass the healthcare overhaul bill, moved Monday to strike a controversial proposal for expanding Medicare and proceed without a new government insurance program, the so-called public option. So now Reid needs to get to 60 votes to pull the public option crap out of the bill just to get it passed....

Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman said Tuesday he is prepared to back a comprehensive health care reform...

As the major power-broker in the current heated debate in the Senate on the pending government takeover of healthcare, Joe Lieberman indicated today that he is set to support the legislation. Prior to the capitulation to Lieberman's demands by Obama and the Democratic leadership, the Connecticut Senator had threatened to join Republicans in blocking the legislation due to his opposition to a public option.

White House: Lieberman-check-...There goes Joe..., it kinda reminds me who fast Mary Landrieu got off the fence after the Lousiana Purchase (Video)

Lieberman told reporters Tuesday that if the Medicare expansion and government insurance plan are gone, "I'm going to be in a position where I can say what I've wanted to say all along: that I'm ready to vote for health care reform." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091215/ap_on_bi_ge/us_health_overhaul_lieberman_1

Don’t believe everything you hear. The Senate Democrats are not on the verge of a collapse. They are on the verge of compromising every single thing they want just so they can get a “health care reform” bill passed. Here’s what I’m being told:

In the predawn hours this morning, over 30 people loaded a chartered bus in a parking lot across from Ross Park Mall were seeing red and it had nothing to do with getting up before 3:00 a.m. "We want to let Washington know that we are not going to let them pass legislation without them knowing how we feel," said Pam Smith of Evans City. Smith was part of a group of grassroots activists and concerned citizens heading down to Washington, D.C., this morning to issue a "code red" alert to stop the health care overhaul legislation from advancing in...

Major Garrett’s in the hall outside the Democratic caucus room and tweeting the word from Tom Harkin. Can’t really call this good news, as it makes passage much more likely, so let’s call it slightly-better-than-worst-case-scenario news. No more public option: Asked by a reporter if the Medicare buy-in will be pulled out, Harkin said “looks that way,” before praising a Democratic health care bill without the two public option compromises. “There’s enough good in this bill that even without those two, we gotta move,” he said. “All the insurance reforms, all the stuff we wrote so hard for prevention and...

December 14, 2009 What Senators Think They Know about Health Care ... Isn’t So. By Ramesh Ponnuru The Senate floor debate on health-care legislation has included a lot of confident assertions — many of them false. Sen. Bill Nelson (D., Fla.), for example, said during floor debate that the uninsured impose a “hidden tax” of more than $1,000 per person. That claim, as regular readers of NRO already know, originated with a left-wing advocacy group. A Kaiser Family Foundation study debunked the group’s analysis, reaching an estimate closer to $200 per year for a family. The Congressional Budget Office has...

More than 80 percent of Democrats say they believe Sen. Joe Lieberman should be stripped of his chairmanship in the Senate if he ends up supporting a Republican filibuster of health care reform. According to the Huffington Post, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Democracy for America ordered a study a few days ago, in which they polled over 800 voters. The main question in the poll was whether Lieberman - an Independent who usually caucuses with the Democrats - should lose his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. 81 percent of Democrats responded that they...

A liberal Web site is trying to enlist celebrities to persuade a top breast cancer research group to dump Sen. Joe Lieberman's wife as its "global ambassador," saying Hadassah Lieberman's health care lobbying work and her husband's opposition to the so-called public option make her unfit for the role.