So far...advantage Pagliuca...

Since Monday's abortion dust up, I'd have to say the bigger winner has been Steve Pagliuca, only because he has the money to exploit the ideological rift between AG Coakley and Congressman Capuano.
You might think that...if Pagliuca's adverts weren't all whiny in tone and full of desperate promises of free hookers to anyone who'll vote for him.
If Pagliuca had any great talent for the game he could turn this thing into a nice tight three way race, but of course he doesn't and all he can think to do is run more commercials.
On the other hand...
Humble Elias doesn't think that his flip flop on the health reform bill is a game ender for Congressman Capuano but he has got to step away from the microphone, stop think and consider his remarks carefully ging forward.
The man just thinks he can explain his way out of trouble.
Hubert Humphrey suffered from the same problem and it helped cost him the US Presidency.
At any rate the stakes are high going into any future debate and that at least is bloggable chaos Humble Elias can take to the bank.

This mah frenz is whut we call a "flip flop"

as Congressman Capuano essentially backtracks and asserts he too would vote against the health care bill if it contained abortion restrictions.
So essentially, Mike Capuano was for the House Bill before he was against it?
Geez Martha Coakley had but to stand her ground for a twenty four hour news cycle before Mike Capuano caved in? Poor evocation of his "I'm an insider with heart, I get the process in DC" meme. If people don't understand your tactics they will !start to question your ethics...Just sayin'folks.
The other guys are all sayin' "no-no-no" but Mike is saying "no but then maybe yes" in a grudging tone, frankly Humble Elias thinks just maybe the whole damn lot of them feel into the AG's rhetorical trap.
Well, it oughta make any upcoming debates real interesting...Just who do I have to caress to get a ringside seat at one of these brawls anyway?

Y'know if Martha Coakley wants to "decry"

the loathsome use of pregnancy as a "pre-existing condition" in the current health reform bill, well more power to her.
It is an open primary for an open seat and everyone has to set terms with respect to the current health care debate
After all, not one month ago, I heard Mike Capuano insist at a Meet-n-Greet in Romantic Menotomy that if the health care bill didn't have a public option he wouldn't vote for it.
I mean, all he was doing was setting terms as AG Coakley has done...what is the problem?
Well, plenty, to hear Congressman Capuano tell it on the Jeff Santos Show this morning the AG is selling out healthcare like it was the Munich conference or something.
Humble Elias thinks Congressman Mike needs to dial it down a bit, he is never less persuasive than when he blusters.
That having been said, I do think everyone's terms regarding healthcare reform ought to be freely debated in an appropriate venue...but Humble Elias can do without the opportunistic palaver.
Frankly, if Pagliuca (Bain Capitol's own would be whipper of Wall Street), Alan Khazei and Capuano all haul off on Coakley, then just maybe the rest of the field may be falling into a rhetorical trap set by the AG.
Just thinkin' out loud.
Anyhow let us commence with the bloggable chaos.

Publicity seeking bullies...

The Westboro Baptist Church (The Rev. Phelps' falangist concern of notorious repute) has taken to protesting out of Sasha and Malia Obama's elementary school.

Class all the way, These people would copulate with chickens as a protest against homosexuality if it mean getting above the fold in the next day's newspaper.

Steve Pagliuca can run those damn TV adverts

until he is blue-in-the-face, but he will never convince me he is anything more than a Democrat Of Convenience (DOC).
And that smug self-righteous insistance that he won't take PAC money, that is a laugh riot, Pagliuca was a macher at Bain Capital which is Political Action Committee unto itself in all things but name. As far as Humble Elias is concerned, Pagliuca made his money the olde fashioned way, by loaning it to other rich white crackers just like his pal, Willard Mitt Romney.
So the whole notion that now, he Steve Pagliuca is gonna chase his former clients on Wall Street thru the US Capitol cracking a bull whip over their heads is patently ludicrous.

"Presidential Leadership is...

Party Leadership" or so Woodrow Wilson once opined.
And to the extent that President Obama has been setting goals, writing the party's mission statement, acting as the democrat's key spokesman and driving the agenda, then it is clear that as far as health care reform is concerned, he has internalized Wilson's notions about presidential leadership.
Lets hope it all yields fruits, we've spent ten times as much on freeing a bunch of Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, we won't spend any of the same tax dollars to get medical coverage for our own citizens?
***
BTW I caught Mary Matalin on CNN today, snarky but dispirited would summarize how she looks and sounded, sorely needs health care to fail either by not coming to a vote or from a catastrophic implementation. She was a wan hunched over figure with a clenched jaw reminiscent of a Connecticut shoreline accent.
In a word, Matalin has become a declinist, a far cry from her start as a peppy and insufferable cheerleader for the GOP and Reaganism in particular. Which gives Humble Elias to think that the poles of the GOP run between the teabagger falangists on one had and the declinists on the other, and not a sensible proposal to had on any topic between either of them.

No one can quite downplay right wing extremism quite like

the Associated Press.
They artfully left out the arrests outside Nancy Pelosi's office, the signs equating health care reform with the Nazi Holocaust and the general tone of violence and intimidation that permeated said "protest".
The problem with the AP is, that they look on this kind of insanity as the normal play of the "loyal opposition" which is nothing but a big "get out of jail free" card to some very dangerous elements.
And I do love the spectacle of seventy-ish retirees recipients of medicare railing against "Obamacare", truly my tax dollars at work keeping them healthy and erect.