No, some of them move to Los Angeles, but only because their work takes them there.

True compromise is when both parties think they're getting everything they want when the reality is no one gets anything.

Stars for Maggot. Very astute.

Well there's all those elections to consider.

The Dems fucked health care up. They had a fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate and they couldn't get a bill to the fucking floor. The health care companies spent billions of dollars on lobbyists to delay, delay, delay and it worked. Now the chance of real health care reform passing is barely alive. The GOP barely contributed.

It really is one of the most spectacular failures in the history of the US government. The Dems were unparalleled cowards, and the president failed to reign them in by providing a timeline or a concrete definition of what "health reform" was supposed to consist of. The whole thing makes voting Republican seem redundant. Sure you can vote in the obstructionist party, but why bother when the other guys are doing such a fine job of destroying their own agenda?

Well, Xeno, that's kind of the problem when the party isn't a bunch of lock-steppers afraid of getting exiled to "Republican In Name Only" land if they disagree with the rest of the members.

Yes, it sucks, and yes, there are a great many who voted the way they did because they are owned by lobbyists from the health care industry, but look at the GOP in the past 8 years just giving the president whatever he wanted, no matter how loopy it was.

Yes, but now we've got a president who doesn't want to torture people. Instead he wants to give people cheaper medicine. Hey, let's get in lockstep and give him whatever he wants.

?

Coming in very late to this discussion, but:

1) That "filibuster-proof majority" assumed that every Democrat, plus Sanders, plus Lieberman were on board. The problem wasn't the Democrats (all 58 of whom were on board) or Sanders, the problem was Lieberman, who had even campaigned against Obama, and was an occasional ally at best. We have Lieberman to thank for the lack of a Public Option; not Obama and not the Democrats, but Lieberman (plus every single Republican, I suppose).

2) You know what happened last time a President tried to dictate to Congress what health care reform should look like? That was HillaryCare and it went down, hard. Obama is smart enough to not make that mistake again; he provided parameters to what a successful health care bill should accomplish, and left it to Congress to find a way to get there that they could actually pass. ObamaCare may not be everything you want, but it DID manage to pass, by the narrowest of margins, and I'm not at all confident that whatever you personally wanted ("you" = "anyone reading this") would have made it through both chambers.

So if you want something better than ObamaCare, first elect the kind of Congress willing to pass something better. Step one is to toss out every Republican you possibly can; after that's done, improve the quality of the Democrats you put into office.

2020 checkin in on bort's read

Well thankfully his president was a very smart and stable genius.

Wow, SolRo, the POETV algorithm told you somehow that I had commented just minutes ago! God Bless POETV!