The "Blue Dogs" have their own website. They brazenly proclaim themselves "fiscally conservative," even as they support every conceivable defense appropriation and brag about how they bring home the pork to their districts. As they put it, not tongue in cheek, they have: "...a deep commitment to the financial stability and national security of the United States."
Defense Department cost overruns alone cost more than enough to finance health care. Joe Conason reports that these overruns sap the taxpayer at the rate of about $300 billion per year--three times what health care reform would cost. (The entire defense budgets of China, Russia, France, the UK, Japan, Germany, and Italy combined don't add up to $300 billion.) You'd think that would be of interest to people who have such a "deep commitment" to "financial stability and national security."
The "Blue Dogs" have become the biggest obstacle to health care reform. Perhaps one of the reasons is that, according to the Center for Public Integrity, "the energy, financial services, and health care industries have accounted for nearly 54 percent of the Blue Dog PAC’s 2009 receipts (up from 45 percent in 2004)," and perhaps this is the reason Thom Hartmann thinks that, rather than "Blue Dog" Democrats, they should call themselves the "Blue Cross" Democrats.
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