MoveOn.org spent $142,803 on the ad.  (This is the price they paid after imposition of the new "controversial liberal advertising" surtax now imposed by the New York Times on anything that criticizes the Bush administration.)  The advertisement ran only once.  It was a black and white, single page ad, like many issue ads that run in newspapers like the NYT and that are forgotton the same day.  Like many people, I never saw the ad in the on-line edition.  I know about it only because of the subsequent media coverage and controversy.  I had to go to Moveon.org to see the ad itself.

So what upset the MSM, the Bush administration, and the United States Senate so profoundly, and what especially seems to have upset the Senate Democratic caucus?  After all, there was certainly no sense-of-the-Senate resolution regarding any one of the dozens of mendacity-packed Republican media hit jobs over the years.  When was the last time that the DLC's keepers of dry powder ever got this riled up about a Swift Boat ad, or an attack on anti-war veterans from the right?

There's a simple explanation for all this.  The MoveOn ad worked.  It worked very well, indeed.  That's what has them so scared and angry.

More below the fold.

The fundamental barrier to enactment of single-payor health insurance, or for that matter, any kind of comprehensive universal coverage, public or private, isn't whether the idea is viable, whether it's a good policy choice or not, or whether it's better than the current health care non-system.  Face it.  We know single-payor works.  We know this because it's worked elsewhere.  The real problem is the size of the existing health care establishment in the United States.  A reform like single-payor health insurance won't happen so long as the health care oligopoly controls several million jobs to administer the system.  Health care is a political machine of unprecedented scope in American history.  We won't shout it down or reason it into submission.  The only way to kill this monster is to starve it to death.

Below the fold, I attempt to define a sixteen step plan for defunding the health care crony network and steps toward single-payor health care.  It takes a page out of the playbook that has worked so well for conservative strategists: instead of going for the one hail mary pass that will enact comprehensive health care, the "sixteen step plan" plays a slow, tough ground game (hey, it's Superbowl weekend).