The Chicago Way: of bribery and intimidation.

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The Chicago Way
Hadassah Lieberman: No breast-cancer spokesperson job for you.
Politics: If the Democrats' stitched-together Frankenstein monster of health care reform gets the 60 votes to get through the Senate, it will have been done through an assortment of bribes and brass knuckles.
With the Medicare buy-in and the public option seemingly gone, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid may be getting close to what he needs to get the nationalization of one-sixth of the nation's economy through the Senate. We'll just be forced to buy the insurance the government wants through its power to tax and regulate the insurance industry.
This seems to be enough to secure the vote of Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who has been under enormous pressure from the liberals not to block their plans for a command-and-control system directed by a maze of bureaucracies, commissions and panels in Washington. The loony left was taking no chances, however.
Just in case, activists led by the blog Firedoglake called on the Susan G. Komen Foundation to fire Joe's wife, Hadassah Lieberman, who works as a paid international spokesperson for the breast-cancer research group.
Blogger Jane Hamsher, a movie producer ("Natural Born Killers") and political activist who runs Firedoglake, went after Mrs. Lieberman on the blog as Sen. Lieberman was refusing to vote for a health care reform bill that included expanding Medicare to people as young as 55.
Have these people no shame? Just ask Kenneth Gladney, beaten up by thugs wearing SEIU shirts outside a St. Louis health care reform town hall.
Sen. Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, has also been critical of the buy-in and public option, but he has an additional issue about whatever comes out of the Senate not involving public funding of abortion in any way. Michael Goldfarb on the Weekly Standard blog quotes a Senate aide as saying the White House is now threatening to put Nebraska's Offutt Air Force Base on the base closure and realignment list if Nelson doesn't fall into line.
Offutt is the headquarters for the U.S. Strategic Command, successor to the Strategic Air Command. STRATCOM was situated in the middle of the country for strategic reasons. Offutt Air Force Base employs some 10,000 military and federal employees in southeast Nebraska. Its closure would be a major blow to the state's economy and would amount to playing politics with our national security.
As Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com puts it, if we're going to bring terrorists into Illinois to placate the liberal left and world public opinion, what does it matter if we put the U.S. Strategic Command on wheels for a few years?"
In what has been called the second Louisiana Purchase, that state's senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, was given a $300 million sweetener for her health care vote. It was not-so-cleverly hidden in language inserted in a bill that targeted help to states hit by major disasters to cover soaring Medicaid costs. Deciphering the language showed it was meant to help only one state and only one senator — the one from the Big Easy. If there's ever a sequel to the book "Profiles in Courage," Sen. Landrieu of Louisiana will not be in it.
We hesitate to speculate what methods may be used to ensure the votes of other senators on the bubble, such as vulnerable Blanche Lincoln, the Democrat from Arkansas, a red state that actually got redder in 2008. Will it be a cutoff of national support or the threat of a well-funded primary opponent? Will it be an offer she can't refuse?
Deal-making and political hardball have long been a part of the legislative process. But as this particular sausage has been made behind closed doors it has reached new levels of arm-twisting that make the smoke-filled rooms of earlier eras seem like Athenian democracy.