And the clowns on the right will continue fanning the flames of race hate.

And, I hope you bought health insurance company stocks Monday.  You'd have made 10 or 15 percent on your money this week so far.

That should tell you exactly who benefits the most from the plans currently before Congress.

Both yesterday and today, C-SPAN had some "journalists" on Washington Journal to interact with callers and it was so bad, I had to change the station - worse than not educating people is mis-educating them.

What I hope vacationing House members face when they return to their districts is an onslaught of feedback from their constituents, who can somehow get through to their representatives what their concerns are and what they want the Congress to do about them.

It's a lot harder to face a voter who arrives with a backpack full of medical bills they cannot pay, and tell that voter whatever help they're looking for they will have to wait at least three more years for.  Harder too, to make the "politically infeasible" argument against single payer to someone who's looking you right in the eye.

I do not expect these committees to come back in September resolved to fix what they have already screwed up, and commit to real reform; at this point, I am keeping my fingers crossed that this particularly bad effort comes off life support.  Hey, there was no help coming until 2013 anyway, right?

For those who think we have to have "something" so we can then start working to make it better, you know that almost never happens.  It's ridiculous that if we know right from the get-go what is better, we decide to start from somewhere short of that point.  

Which journalist precisely do you recommend for that role?

Of course, this is why President Obama SHOULD take the bull by the horns and OWN this discussion.

I understand he made an error at the end of his press conference last week but that is no reason to cede the ground.

He needs to shut everybody on his WH team up because they just stink. He has to do it himself. By himself.

If the president, the Congress and the pundit class including bloggers all had to "eat dogfood" when it came to healthcare....

...they would understand the healthcare issue.
...they would care about the healthcare issue.
...they would advocate the issue.
...they would sit down and read the bills before voting
...a good bill would pass.

BARACK OBAMA: ..

.When you rush these budgets that are a foot high and nobody has any idea what's in them and nobody has read them.

BARACK OBAMA:

Yeah. And it gets rushed through without any clear deliberation or debate then these kinds of things happen. And I think that this is in some ways what happened to the Patriot Act. I mean you remember that there was no real debate about that. It was so quick after 9/11 that it was introduced that people felt very intimidated by the administration.

My recent experience as a volunteer police officer underscores my point. For more than 4 years, I worked as an unpaid officer with Arlington County, VA, a purportedly progressive jurisdiction. On May 12, however, I got a concussion while participating in the Police Unity Tour, an event that honors officers who have died in the line of duty.

Shortly afterwards, the police department terminated me -- and said so in writing -- because of my concussion. No request for medical documentation, no discussion with the supervisor who sent me the letter, not even "thank you for your service."

Presently, I have two Americans With Disabilities Act complaints pending against the department. The moral of the story is this: In a flash, one can quickly wind up perceived as disabled or otherwise somehow different. In such cases, it is alarming, too, how quickly people make decisions on one's behalf, even when those decisions contradict the advice of one's physician.