"According to a source briefed on White House-Senate health care negotiations, the public option's saving grace was its political popularity with the Democratic base. The source described the back and forth between Senate health care principals and the White House as a "sort of stare down where the two sides were saying, 'you be the face of pulling it out.'" --TPM, 10/28
So maybe all those Saturday mornings spent collecting petitions, and the phone calls to my reps, and the visit to Price's office, weren't a waste of time after all. Cool.
Thank you very much for your work; all I did was call, once. I'm really relieved that it seems to be going through. (And I used to *like* Olympia Snowe, dammit!)
Completely off-topic note: I just found my Victoria Regina book and reunited it with the cards, after an absence of at least 7 years. HOORAY! That is such a beautiful artifact, and I'm grateful to have a copy. All the links on your old VT Website seem to be broken, by the way; I don't know if you still care.
Don't sell yourself short; calling is a lot! A lot of people aren't willing to do it. I think they rank contacts from constituents by the effort it takes to make the contact, so calling is worth more than, say, an internet petition (which take so little effort they're basically meaningless in my opinion).
I'm so glad you have the VRT, that really means a lot to me! I know there are broken links on the site & I've been meaning to fix it forever. The problem is that since I do web stuff for a living, I never want to do it in my free time :)