Who cares what Olympia Snowe thinks?

Here we go again.

For some reason I can't totally fathom, it's terribly important to get one GOP Senator to vote for health care reform. Why? Well, no one can quite tell us why. Other than some bizarre notion of - there's that word again - "bipartisanship."

Well here's a news flash. It's not a bipartisan bill when it passes with 59 Democratic votes, one Independent, and one Republican. That's a Democratic bill, with one Republican who for whatever reason abandoned her party. It's not bipartisan.

Don't listen to me, just look at recent history.

Remember the stimulus bill? The one we gave 40% away to the Republicans, in the form of relatively useless tax cuts, in order to woo GOP votes? How many GOP votes did we get out of the entire Congress of 535 members? Three, all Senators.

And that's three times more than we'll get if Olympia Snowe ends up voting for the bill.

What did we get for those 3 Republican votes? Did Republicans stop accusing Obama, Reid and Pelosi of breaking the bank and wasting the stimulus money on pork? No. Are all the angry Teabaggers protesting around the country focusing their ire on Republicans and Democrats for passing the stimulus bill? No. Does anyone in America outside of Washington, DC actually think that the stimulus package was a bipartisan coming together of both parties? No.

Then why are we repeating the same old charade and willing to make the health care reform plan less effective in order to get a single stupid Republican vote?

This is President Obama's plan that's going to pass a Democratic Congress. Come next year, if our rates still go up and insurance companies continue to stonewall when we ask them to pay our medical expenses, the only people anyone is going to blame are Democrats. I sure hope getting Olympia Snowe on board is worth it, because come next January, no one's going to remember that she was involved at all.