{"id":190356,"date":"2009-12-06T21:54:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T02:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/12\/06\/sellout\/"},"modified":"2009-12-06T21:54:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-07T02:54:00","slug":"sellout","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/12\/06\/sellout\/","title":{"rendered":"Sellout"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2009\/12\/06\/obama-silent-on-public-op_n_381847.html\">Obama gave a speech to Senators in the Democratic Caucus in order to whip up support for birth control<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I think that what is more interesting is not what he said, but what he did not say:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">&#8220;Well, <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">he didn&#8217;t mention either abortion or the public option<\/span><span style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\">,&#8221; said Harkin, a strong backer of the public option and a chairman of the health committee. &#8220;He just laid out in very stark terms for us what the future would be if we didn&#8217;t pass [health care reform]. I think he&#8217;s right. I think it would be devastating. Not just for us as a party, I think for the hope that people have that we&#8217;re going to actually make these changes. To fail at this would just again be another one of those things where people say, &#8216;See, Washington doesn&#8217;t work. Washington can&#8217;t get anything done. We gave the Democrats all that power and nothing happens.&#8217; And it would be depressing to people. We want to be more hopeful, we want to give people hope. So I thought his message on that was right on target.<\/span>&#8220;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I think that the idea of relying on Barack Obama for meaningful healthcare, or for that matter support of abortion strong abortion rights, is a losing proposition.<\/p>\n<p>He is more interested in signing something (keep him away from toilet paper) with the mane &#8220;healthcare reform&#8221; on it.<\/p>\n<p>On the matter of abortion, as <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2007\/12\/obama-and-abortion-profile-in-cowardice.html\">I noted 2 years ago<\/a>, he is not willing to lend anything more than lip service to defending abortion rights.<\/p>\n<p>He will do the right thing only if the pressure from his own party leaves him no other alternative.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So, Obama gave a speech to Senators in the Democratic Caucus in order to whip up support for birth control. I think that what is more interesting is not what he said, but what he did not say: &#8220;Well, he didn&#8217;t mention either abortion or the public option,&#8221; said Harkin, a strong backer of the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1123,1142,998,1046],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-190356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion","category-barack-obama","category-congress","category-healthcare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190356"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}