Izzy Stone, the great investigative journalist who garnered most of his stories (and evidence) from public sources, "taught a generation of journalists to doubt government propaganda, dig for facts in documents, and find the whistleblowers who told the truth..." said all governments lie.

There are no exceptions, even in this administration and this Democratic Party controlled Congress.

That's a tragedy.  Considering what this country and its people have endured during the criminal GOP Bushite regime, there had been some hope that this Democratic Obama administration and a majority Democratic Congress  would be different and would bring change for the common good.  That hope has been dashed repeatedly by both branches of government.

For example, the so called health care reform that is shaping up to be a Rube Goldberg monstrosity, has added another phony, bamboozling bell and whistle, courtesy of Senator Kent Conrad's "co-operative" idea.

From Scarecrow via Firedoglake: "It is hard to know where to begin with Ezra Klein’s assessment of Sen. Kent Conrad’s “compromise” proposal to establish member-owned “co-ops” instead of a government-sponsored “public” health insurance option. Klein thinks the co-ops might work, but he fears Congressional progressives will not accept the idea as compromise. How did the debate get this confused?

You’d think we’d never thought of non-profits or the co-op model before, but the nation has some 29,000 different co-ops, most of them local and designed to help individual sellers or individual buyers aggregate their market power, pool risks and achieve economies of scale.

Moreover, we’ve had co-ops in health care for years in several states; they’re just called something else. [Updated: That's fine, but where's the evidence they've made a significant dent in the underlying problems in our national health care system?]

Even if there were a national co-op large enough to compete with the private plans, there is no reason to believe that the total system would solve the underlying problems of industry concentration, discrimination, private system rationing by price, exclusion of high-cost patients and – critically important -- the perverse incentives of the existing for-profit compensation paradigm, the very problem for which the President said, "this is what we have to fix."

And Robert Reich adds: Here's the latest contortion from Senate Dems trying to win over a few Republicans to a "public option:" Let nonprofits create health-care cooperatives, and call them the public option. Kent Conrad came up with this bamboozle. Finance chair Baucus is impressed, and some Republicans -- even Grassley -- seem interested. Watch your wallets.

Nonprofit health-care cooperatives won't have any real bargaining leverage to get lower prices because they'll be too small and too numerous. Pharma and Insurance know they can roll them. That's why the Conrad compromise is getting a good reception from across the aisle, just as Olympia Snowe's "trigger" (whereby no public option until some time down the pike, and only if Pharma and Insurance don't bring down and extend coverage a tad) is also gaining traction.

The truth is that there's only one "public option" that will truly bring down costs and premiums -- one that's national in scale and combines its bargaining power with Medicare, and is allowed to negotiate lower drug prices and lower doctor and hospital fees. And that's precisely what Pharma and Insurance detest, for exactly the same reason.

Russell Mokhiber of Single Payer Action via CommonDreams distills the problem thus: "Nick Skala was in a bit of shock.

"In early June, he was invited to speak before the Progressive Caucus of the House of Representatives about single payer health care.

"There are about 71 members of the House who belong to the Progressive Caucus — about a third of the Democratic Caucus.

"Skala is a true believer in single payer — having spent four years with Physicians for a National Health Program.

"So, yes of course, he would love to speak before the Progressive Caucus to explain why single payer was the only way to control costs and cover everyone.

"And that Obama’s public option was bound to fail.

"He sent his presentation ahead of time to Bill Goold, the executive director of the Progressive Caucus, and Darcy Burner, executive director of the American Progressive Caucus Foundation.

"Both were not pleased with Skala.

“ ' Bill Gould emailed me after reading my testimony and materials I was going to present to tell me that they were not acceptable and that there could be no comparison between single payer and the public option with side by side comparison,” Skala told Single Payer Action. 'Darcy Burner told me that they would construe talking about the public option  — even comparing it to single payer — as an attack on the members of the Progressive Caucus.'

“ 'Now, I can’t see how honest discourse about whether or not a public option will work — especially when it comes from 16,000 doctors and the majority of nurses — as an attack on anybody who supports it. We see it as telling the truth.'

Despite Goold’s and Burner’s objections, on June 4, Skala went ahead and made his presentation to the caucus.

“During the presentation it was very nasty,” Skala said. “I got some very dirty looks from Darcy Burner. During the question period and once during the testimony, I was interrupted, told that the Progressive Caucus had taken a position on this issue and unless I had something positive to contribute, then there wasn’t really much point to answering my questions. At least one of my questions to the staff of the Chairman of the caucus was interrupted by the staff of the Congressional Progressive Caucus unfortunately.”

"And what exactly was Skala’s crime?

"He believes the public option being pushed by Obama and the Democrats will fail.

“ 'The public option preserves all the systemic deficiencies that we see in the current system,' Skala said. 'It maintains a finance system that is based on private insurance and private insurers and their drive to fight claims, issue denials, screen out the sick and make a big profit generate tremendous administrative waste — 400 billion dollars a year.'

“ 'Now you can expand coverage by just raising taxes and paying insurers to cover people but that’s not a sustainable system,' Skala said. 'But it won’t cover every body and it will fall apart quickly due to rising cost as we’ve seen in Massachusetts, Vermont, Oregon, Tennessee and Minnesota — state after state after state and it hasn’t worked.'

“ 'Now the definition of insanity is to repeat what has gone on in the past and expect a different result. Yet that’s what we’re doing with the public option. And as a representative of physicians in that capacity, and certainly the relationship I have with nurses and patients, I feel it’s my duty to be honest about the best policy research, the best literature, and the best experience that we have and that all indicates that the public option is going to fail.' "