THIS MODERN WORLD

Here:

My marker for Obama was whether he’d get a health care bill with a public option. He didn’t. A year ago passage of some sort of health care reform seemed inevitable, and not a tremendous challenge. Only a year of dithering and bipartisaning and gangs of wankers and pre-compromising and, frankly, failure to put forward something simple and popular jeopardized it.

The bill’s more good than bad, but it isn’t what we should have gotten. It isn’t what we voted for.

If passage of this bill helps a single person anywhere, then it was worth passing in whatever form possible. Health care in this country is a total clusterfuck, as anyone who’s ever dealt with an insurance company knows. But teabagger freakouts notwithstanding, this only barely qualifies as a victory.

Regular readers of this site are aware that these are not good days for alt-cartooning. The latest bad news: citing budgetary constraints, Salon is dropping my friend Ruben Bolling’s fantastic Tom the Dancing Bug strip. I find this extraordinarily depressing for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that TTDB (as we insiders call it) is the cartoon my own cartoon wishes it could be when it grows up.

Ruben is looking for a new home on the web, but in the meantime you can always find his comics at his ucomics page, which I strongly encourage you to bookmark.

Just carve out fifteen minutes and watch this. Trust me.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
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The missing public option. For the record, I don’t support killing the bill — any modest improvement will still affect real people’s lives. Maybe this Rube Goldberg contraption, sans public option, really is the best we could ever have hoped for, in this political climate. That doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating.

Here’s the full article referenced in the fourth panel.

As to the question of whether or not Obama campaigned on the public option, I defer to Ezra Klein:

For one thing, it was in his campaign plan, which is to say, he campaigned on it … The White House argues that they didn’t emphasize it in public speeches, and according to Salon’s Alex Koppelmann, that’s true. But speaking as someone who did a lot of reporting on their health-care plan, they emphasized it privately quite a bit. It was, in fact, their answer to a lot of the other flaws in their proposal. So whether Obama used it in his speeches, his campaign purposefully pushed it to, at the least, some reporters, which is to say they worked to ensure that people knew about the public option’s important role in their health-care thinking.

Obama’s latest statement on this is hair-splitting at best and misleading at worst. That’s even more true given how often he mentioned the public option after he got elected. And it’s a good example of why the left is losing its trust in Obama.

An update from our friends at Glox News.