He was for expanding Medicare and Medicaid before he was against it, and against making the filibuster so powerful it would tempt Senators to abuse it by holding the country hostage just to increase or flaunt their "power as an individual Senator" -- before the filibuster became his favorite toy! And the subject he's screwing around with is reform of a system that kills 44,789 U.S. citizens every year for profit (Harvard). Obviously, Joe's hypocrisy is much more grave than the typical Congressional scandal, indiscreet pursuit of happiness among unattractive consenting adults. This is not funny.
Joe Lieberman's power lust is killing tens of thousands of innocent, good, hard working people. Putting him in his place cannot wait until until Harry Reid loses patience, or until January 2011, assuming Liberal Democrats win at least one seat in the Senate. This year's health care reform will certainly only be a beginning, but it must not be the waste of paper Joe Lieberman would make of it. Checking his abuse of power has to be done now. This week. This is what we must do, and how we can do it.
First, the Homeland Security Department and the corresponding Senate Committee that Joe Chairs did not exist until after George Walker Bush neglected his 6 August 2001 Presidential Daily Brief entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US." To make a long and well-known story short, the problem was not the lack of a Homeland Security Department, it was a negligent President, who is now gone. So Lieberman is Chairman of a powerful, completely unnecessary committee created to oversee a completely unnecessary department. Get rid of the useless Department and the useless Committee, and as a bonus, you get rid of the other power Joe likes to abuse.
The rest of the Senate should direct the various agencies which were merged into the Department of Homeland Security to continue sharing information about terrorism but to revert in name, legal contracts, all titles and letterheads, etc. to separate agencies. And in the same Act, the Senate should disband the Homeland Security Committee, effective immediately. The military and intelligence committees were adequate to oversee all those agencies before the Cheney/Bush junta and will be adequate in the future. (Unless somebody worse than those two war criminals hijacks our country, in which case it just won't matter, but let's try to stay on topic.)
Second, make clear to Maine's Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, that we appreciated their "moderate" noises over the summer, and we expect -- no, we demand that they start acting like the good-faith negotiating partners that they then represented themselves to be. Their state will receive no federal funds for anything but Atlantic windmills and social programs unless they support Ron Wyden's plan, or better, Medicare for all.
Give them two days to consider the offer, then announce the same conditions to all Red States, defined for sake of this discussion as states whose two Senators are both Republican. In some Red States, Solar development might be substituted for or combined with Wind Power, of course.
"Oh, that's so cruel to the Red State people! Some of them are Liberals, too!"
Tough luck. They should have thought of that when they voted for those jackasses, or neglected to campaign harder to elect somebody better.
Okay, to get a little more exact and a little less brutal, clean energy produced anywhere is good for the whole country, so that and Green Jobs education will not be cut off anywhere. Neither will any existing health care, or other vital social services like Head Start, if that even still exists.
I'm talking about cutting off things like corporate subsidies to ADM and their partner farmers in the Midwest Red States, other agriculture subsidies in the Southern Red States, and petroleum and coal subsidies in Wyoming, Oklahoma and Texas -- the kinds of things that matter to traitors like Lieberman, Inhofe and other corporate sellouts, aka Republicans. I don't actually know what exactly we'd cut off in Maine, but I am sure there is some largess to eliminate which would only bother the corrupt, because like every Red State, Maine receives more federal spending than it pays in taxes. And so when Senate Democrats stare down Senate Republicans like they really understand the meaning of this leverage, then Red State citizens will change the "minds" of their Senators, you betcha! At least, one or two of those facing re-election next November will sense and understand the shift in the wind's direction, and that's all we need.