When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Matthew 25:31

This is just nuts. I’m trying and failing to imagine where the Occupation of Wall Street goes without including Democrats. Jane Hamsher wants to play gatekeeper, though. Remember what I said about firebaggers as the “cool kids”? This is what I’m talking about. Mind you, Jane doesn’t separate sheep from goats when it comes to collecting checks for her blog ads company; her Puritanism is reserved solely for the goats:

It’s hard to overstate the madness of this kind of thinking. Mass movements are supposed to be just that, mass movements. I’m meeting people on Court Street later today to pass out flyers and hold a “mic check” for freedom, and in a town like Florence that may mean a dozen people this first time, if I’m lucky. Apparently, I’m supposed to pre-screen them first: have you ever donated to MoveOn? Sorry, this democratic uprising is only for the cool kids.

What’s happening in New York and around the country proves the truth of what I’ve been saying for three years — that a political party will display more spinal and intestinal fortitude when a movement makes a helpful noise instead of working against them. Take Harry Reid last night:

Reid whipped out an ace he’s had up his sleeve since he became majority leader — one that his liberal critics wish he’d used two years ago to end the filibuster and ram the Democratic agenda through the Senate without having to contend with frustrating supermajority requirements. Reid and 50 of his Democrats simply voted to overrule the parliamentarian’s decision that McConnell’s motion was in order. Presto, McConnell’s motion could not come to a vote, and Reid had avoided a political embarrassment — and eliminated a very small minority right in the Senate.

But this wasn’t just about checkmating McConnell. As he said in a statement late Thursday, “The Senate must have the ability to move forward on legislation that has broad bipartisan support. A small minority of senators cannot be allowed to bring bipartisan legislation, like a bill to end China’s job-killing, underhanded currency manipulation, to a grinding halt when 14 million Americans are out of work.”

Then there’s the president picking a fight with Congress. Mind you, Obama has the permission of public opinion to do so. Democrats want what the tea party was: a movement that felt real and gave them a chance to vent their frustrations. That’s even more true seeing how the first three years of hope and change turned out. What makes me different from Hamsher, I guess, is that I actively support specific legislation both the president and the Occupation stand for. I want to have a Buffet Rule, and the president wants a Buffet Rule, and the Occupation wants a Buffet Rule. It’s in the AJA.

Jane has done exactly as much work to pass the AJA here as the ACA (health care) before. I.e., notadamnthing. Here she has enjoyed several minutes to talk about pressuring Congress on the issues of import (there are many! Where to begin?), and a real grassroots movement really ought to visit Congress and apply public pressure. Indeed, it might find popular support. Imagine, if you will, hundreds of thousands of actual-real-not-imaginary people of diverse backgrounds taking the people’s House back.

This might be a great time to be seen actually doing something specific about jobs, because that’s what Americans are most concerned with right now: jobs. There simply aren’t enough. The president is talking non-stop about jobs, and infrastructure, and so are the Democrats. I’m sure that counts for nothing in Jane’s universe — just as I’m sure Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean (both have endorsed the Occupation) will have to come through Jane’s gateway if we are to succeed.

So I’m glad to watch Keith Olbermann deliver the Occupation’s demands. But to get the beltway’s attention — to actually pierce and deflate the Broderian consensus bubble around austerity economics — Americans must “crash the gates” together. I’m looking forward to meeting Olbermann next year. I’ll be glad to see Kos and maybe Marcy again. But we cannot all get together at Netroots Nation with Jane Hamsher if she and Dan Choi are still pretending the president is not into them when they’re the ones measuring the gate. There is an element of the Occupation that actively wants nothing to do with the president or Democrats; fine, I say. But the movement will be what you make of it, and if we are to survive the age of austerity politics we must end it ourselves, together.

The way forward is through. We can do this, yes we can, and Jane wants to play gatekeeper. GreenBeck wants to be keymaster. (Yes, that’s a Ghostbusters joke; David Sirota is Zuul). I won’t let these people destroy what has been started around the nation. I have to go talk to people this afternoon, and some of them will not fit through the gates these people leave open. Unlike them, I want this to work more than I want to be cooler than Obama.

Just pass a damn jobs bill — even through the Senate — and this movement gains instant credibility. Follow through with direct pressure on the House, whether they pass it or not, and we have crashed the gate. This is not about Republicans or Democrats; it’s about change. Change comes out of movements (she’s picking a fight with Van Jones? Seriously?!), not a man. We are the hope and change we’ve been waiting for.

Maybe then we can talk about a change election — a true change election, one that doesn’t include further damage to democracy or Democrats. Starting over with a whole new program sounds like another prescription for failure to me. It means you need original infrastructure; and I’m just not prepared to build all of that by myself. Jane and company can go ahead if they want, but remember how that’s worked out before.

The way forward is through. Push for passage of a bill. Push for another. Create model legislation. For heaven’s sake, I’m mentioning people with legal education; they should draft a law this Congress would pass, or else organize to actively change who gets elected in America. Let the fissaparous Aravosians rally around their darlings — go ahead! — but let’s stop the meltdown.

By the way, I coined firebagger to mean a self-destructive critic. I’ve noted the “PROUD FIREBAGGER” t-shirt on certain websites; and that’s fine. Let them organize in a democracy, but the American democracy has Democrats in it. You will have to let them in. You will have to let me in. You will have to let Blue Dogs, an endangered species, in (and Yellow Dogs, too — knowing the difference is half the battle).

This movement needs to happen en masse, or it’s not a mass movement.

Tell both your senators to pass the bill NOW.

Senate switchboard: (202) 224-3121

It doesn’t matter which party they’re with. Hold their feet to the fire!

I am SHOCKED, I say, that a man who pandered to teabaggers at health care town halls with Soylent Green death panels and immigration hysteria, openly advocated removing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and who boasts an impressive seven percent progressive rating versus a mere 33% conservative rating, has turned coat. Whodathunkit?

With Griffith, disingenuous politics are a given. He’s cut from the George Wallace mold. He can’t even be honest about his reasons: speaking to POLITICO, Griffith made the case that Obama’s cancellation of a missile shield was his proximate cause for the switch. Sure, the strategic choice of a sea-based system closer to Iran did take contracts away from Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, at the center of his district, and direct them to other states. But that was in September — why do this now?

More likely is the explanation that Griffith has never actually been a Democrat. He voted against the Lily Ledbetter Act, every version of health care reform, and the stimulus bill, while actively working against the union workers who put him over the top.

If the man is starting to sound like a closet Republican finally going home, then you’re getting the picture.

Griffith’s latest move is all about cutting off his right flank. He’s a first-term representative elected by a razor-thin margin over Republican Wayne Parker, a wingnut among wingnuts who (rumor has it) will run again.* In becoming the GOP incumbent, Griffith hopes to cut off his main opponent and face an empty Democratic field.

But good luck with that strategy in the age of Teabag Terror. Red State’s Eric Erickson has already declared him persona non grata:

We should now hope him [sic] be an extremely endangered Republican in a primary. We will not fix the GOP’s problems if we keep allowing people who are not one of us to suddenly switch the letter next to their name and magically become one of us.

How ironic, how deeply delicious, would it be to see Griffith embrace the Teabag Terror only to get crushed? That vision is all the sweeter when you realize that Griffith’s politics have never been those of a Democrat or even a Republican.

Griffith has always been about Griffith.

It’s in the way this oncologist speaks of tort reform as a magic silver bullet to solve the health care crisis. It’s plainly etched in the career path of a doctor who made his sizable fortune by embracing the trend towards patients-as-profit-centers. It’s in the spectacle of Griffith throwing red meat at Norton Auditorium in August.

It’s in his embrace of the party that paid for this disgusting ad used against him (h/t to GottaLaff):

The progressive core in Congress and organized activists can work to speed up the pace of reform, and if we are to get a climate bill they will have to. But there is one legislative fight that progressives certainly can win: financial industry reform.

There is certainly no better issue to galvanize public support. The economy is no longer in free-fall, but taxpayers have put some $700 billion into the financial system and have yet to see banks start lending again. Wall Street is a powerful lobby, but there hasn’t been an opportunity this good in decades to reverse the deregulatory trend.

Indeed, Wall Street is incredibly unpopular, and the feeling is bipartisan. No astroturf agency in its right mind would try to get teabaggers marching in favor of banks; the anger over bailouts dampens attempts at anti-reform demagoguery.

We are now one year past the Lehman Brothers meltdown with no appreciable changes; that’s entirely the result of these delays, and every day that conservatives fight that reform is another blow to their credibility.

So when the health care bill finally passes, it will be time for a progressive majority to press for a faster pace — and there’s no better issue than Obama’s proposed financial consumer protection overhaul.

Looks to me like we’ve cycled back around to that phase again.

Chuck Grassley (R- Oppositesland) finally admitted today there are no “death panels” in the health care reform legislation. He then blamed Republican hysteria on mixed signals from the White House:

Use early, use often. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The Blue Dog revolt against the House leadership’s health care overhaul took a new turn Tuesday morning, when a several members of the centrist faction made overtures to House Republicans about joining forces to slow and reshape the bill.

Republican aides said there was great interest among GOP lawmakers in trying to work with dissidents in the 52-member Blue Dog Coalition to try to stop the legislation. “Blue Dogs will be the main event all week,” said one GOP aide, referring to efforts by Republicans to woo Blue Dogs

The Gang of Six in the Senate Finance Committee wants to throw out the public option, leading Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) to say that Senate leaders should “pull the plug” on bipartisan negotiations:

“What concerns me about what’s happened in the Senate Finance Committee is that they’ve had a whole lot of time to work these things out, and just don’t seem to be able to break the impasse,” Van Hollen said in an interview on the liberal “Bill Press Radio Show.” “It doesn’t seem to be as much about a disagreement over policy issues, and it seems more to be just the lack of the political will on behalf of some to get it done.” (Emphasis mine)

But given Harry Reid’s lack of spine, Van Hollen is probably asking too much. Nor is the Senate alone: blue dogs on the House Finance Committee are obstructing the legislation as well, even though chairman Henry Waxman offered them a deal late last night over their chief concern:

The fiscally conservative Blue Dogs were at odds with the leadership over setting rates for the payments to doctors and other health care providers under a proposed government-run health plan that would compete with private insurance. The House bill models the payments based on Medicare, but Blue Dogs want a negotiated rate similar to private insurance.

Press coverage of the health care debate has gotten very pessimistic, highlighting these and other setbacks. The Village Media pays an almost fawning attention to the Gang of Six. The legislation is certainly not going to meet Obama’s preferred deadline this Friday. Yet Nancy Pelosi remains confident that health care reform will pass:

Defying skeptics in her party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed Sunday to overcome lingering obstacles and pass health-care reform in the House, restoring momentum to President Obama’s top domestic priority and order to her own unruly Democratic caucus.

“When I take this bill to the floor, it will win,” Pelosi (Calif.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “This will happen.”

At Obsidian Wings, blogger Publius explains that many of the 52 House blue dogs are in vulnerable districts that either voted for McCain or barely voted for Obama. But eleven of them are in very pro-Obama districts:

In short, the Blue Dogs are both stronger and weaker than I thought. Most of the ones causing trouble seem to be structurally limited by electoral realities. Mike Ross, for instance, doesn’t need to be seen as helping Obama in an Arkansas district that shifted from Bush +3 to McCain +19 (I wonder why the district would do that?).

At the same time, though, there are many Blue Dogs whose districts will push them the other way. Loretta Sanchez, for instance, has come out strongly for the public option. And you can understand why. It just seems impossible for the Blue Dog leadership to muster a 52-strong bloc.

And that, then, is the way to undermine the Blue Dogs. The leaders seem hopeless because they’re enjoying their day in the sun AND are constrained by their districts. So the better option is not to work from the top down, but from the bottom up.

And at FiveThirtyEight.com, Nate Silver doubts the plan from the Senate’s Gang of Six has a chance because

this particular permutation on health care reform looks an awful lot like the incomplete draft of the HELP Committee’s bill that the CBO scored last month, which also lacked an employer mandate and a public option but contained an individual mandate. That bill, the CBO estimated, would cost about $1.0 trillion — but would only cover a net of about 16 million people. In contrast, the revised version of the HELP Committee’s bill, which did include both a public option and an employer mandate, would cost about the same amount but cover a net of 37 million people. (Emphasis mine)

Furthermore, a CBO report says the blue dogs’s biggest complaint — that a public option will destroy the insurance industry — is pure nonsense:

The report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the public option proposed by Democrats would not drive private insurers out of business and most people would still choose to get their medical coverage through employers.

[...]

The CBO report estimated only about 10 million to 11 million people would sign up for the public option by 2019, far fewer than the 103 million cited in another analysis by the Lewin Group. The Lewin Group is part of Ingenix, a wholly-owned subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.

The CBO report also estimated the Democratic proposal would boost enrollment in employer-based plans by about 12 million people because of the mandate for individuals to be insured. (Emphasis mine)

As I said a week ago, rumors of the death of health care reform have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the numbers on the Democratic plan keep scoring well with the CBO:

Washington, D.C. — The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window – and even produces a $6 billion surplus. CBO estimated more than $550 billion in gross Medicare and Medicaid savings. More importantly, the bill includes a comprehensive array of delivery reforms to set the stage for lowering the future growth in health care costs. (Emphasis mine)

Maybe Nancy Pelosi just understands the numbers better than the Village.