Hillary must be rolling on the ground laughing her guts out. You'd think at some point the Dems would figure it out that attacking health care is like trying to launch a winter offensive against Moscow.

Don't be fooled. This is just a change in strategy.
Obama and his left wing extremist congressmen and women want Public Option and will not stop and will rule out no method until it is Law.
This is a MUST have for these guys.

I think you're right -- could just be a head fake. From a military perspective, "retreat" doesn't equal "surrender." Retreat is intended to marshall forces, regroup, and re-attack the enemy from a different position.

Just found this. I'll bet the "backing off" is just an attempt to get people to quiet down over the recess and reduce the embarrassment from protestors at town hall meetings. The real test will be when Congress goes into session again, where they'll no doubt start up again with some sort of "new" program they'll claim is much better than the old one, but which will essentially be the same thing. Obama's been beating the anti-corporate drum again, so maybe they'll package it as a bill to put the screws to evil corporate interests.

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/08/17/blue-dog-excellent-idea-...

I guess its all going to depend on how they rewrite the bill. If they're just renaming the government option a co-op, then yeah, its just more political maneuvering, however if they indeed create a true co-op, I believe it could be a viable option.

Co-ops have been used for many things in this country for a long time, from electrical co-ops to farm/ranch co-ops. They can work well.

What's most disturbing to me about this bloated bill is that no one, not even Obama - can answer questions about the bill itself. He's running around the country pushing this bill, but basically doesn't even know what's in it himself. Like his campaign, he has set talking points at all town hall meetings and doesn't really answer questions or deviate from his canned message.

Even sadder (or maybe its hilarious!) is that the congressmen/women and senators don't even know what's in the bill. They may be familiar with a very small portion of it, but no one I've seen in interviews knows what the whole package is really about. So - if our politicians don't know what they're peddling, how in the world are we supposed to just blindly accept this mess?

They need to totally rewrite it, in plain English and reduce to a max of 100 pages. Personally I believe health care reform should be attacked in small chunks. I also think tort reform needs to happen first.

The more I'm watching this play out in recent news, the more I see this as a tactic to erode opposition, not a retreat. What's Obama's current position, really? In one forum, they say the public option is off the table. In another, they say of course it's not off the table, and where did you ever get such a crazy idea?

It's a classic tactic -- sow confusion in your opposition to weaken them. They're hoping it'll quiet down some of the protesting during the recess, and it'll stay ambiguous until Congress gets back in session.

Funny thing is the real problems won't be from conservatives, it will be from a few rogue Democrats that won't get on the parties bandwagon and give them the filibuster proof majority they need. All we have to do is wait it out and watch as they self destruct they're own legislation.