My Twitter is mostly apolitical, but I’ve tweeted a little about healthcare this week because it’s such a prominent part of every conversation.

So here’s a fun fact: I’m one of those crazy people who think health care reform is not really worth doing if it doesn’t have the public option. I love when right-wing politicians get on TV and say things like, “What Obama really wants is a single-payer system,” as if Obama were advocating drowning puppies. That’s funny.

Anyway, I’m a big scary liberal. But you knew that.

Over the last two weeks, every tweet I’ve made about healthcare has been followed up by either getting followed by a conservative politician or an @ reply linking to an article full of lies about what’s in the plan. Today I got an @ reply linking to a Youtube video cobbling together things Barbara Boxer has said and trying to prove that she advocates killing your grandma. I kind of want to respond and say, “You get that I like the idea of the government ensuring that all Americans get health care, right? Was that not clear from my tweets? Do you even read?”

Followers and @ replies from people advocating the public option: 0. Unless you count some silliness that happened under the hashtag #obamacarefacts. (Under Obamacare, all Americans will have to eat all their vegetables before they can have dessert, for example.)

I wonder about that a little. The people who stand in the way of real health care reform seem to be working harder than the rest of us. It’s possible that these politicians on twitter that are spamming people that stop to listen and a few people are clearly getting convinced, if the poll numbers mean anything.

So maybe it’s time to rethink our strategy.

I wondered for a long time if Republican education policy, for example No Child Left Behind, was really an attempt to destroy public education and render Americans stupid. It’s a little conspiracy theorist, but consider the ways conservative talking points dismantle education: “evolution is just a theory,” for example. Standardized testing puts the thrust of classroom time on passing tests, not on actually learning.

What strikes me about our current national debate (both on health care and the whole birther thing, which are related) is that if some of the people participating in the town hall shenanigans had just learned a thing or two about American history, or if they’d even just been taught the critical thinking skills to sort out what’s true and what’s completely unreasonable, none of this would be happening.

Not to be a conspiracy theorist.

I’m not sure what I can add to this debate (if it can even be called a “debate”) because I believe Obama is the legit president (hell, I voted for him) and I believe that the US is in dire need of health care reform and I strongly support the public option. I’m all for single-payer healthcare, in fact. That’s the wild thing about this “debate”; so many of the people decrying the public option are on Medicare, which is… single-payer, government-run health insurance.

I went 10 months without health insurance in 2007, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what some people go through, although I did injure my foot and wind up in the ER during that time. I lucked out and had read an article about what to do in NYC if you need a doctor but don’t have insurance, so I went to a public ER with a sliding scale payment system, and the ER visit wound up costing me a mere $45. I spent 8 hours in the hospital, though, and the verdict was that I had a sprain and there wasn’t really anything the doctor could do for me anyway. That strikes me as… inefficient.

I have insurance now through my employer, and it covers most things, although I’m learning that there’s a really limited number of doctors who will take my insurance. So health care isn’t rationed? I had a doctor that I liked and trusted that I can’t afford to see anymore because she doesn’t take my insurance.

So, I’ve seen first-hand how fucked the system is. A Brit acquaintance of mine said to me just yesterday that the American healthcare system boggled his mind. (And I love this whole Stephen Hawking thing, where in an editorial argued that the British NHS would have killed poor Hawking who is a British citizen who has stated that he owes his life to care he got from the NHS. A lot of forehead slapping is going on during this debate.)

I feel like this is common sense. Is it possible that there are any Americans that don’t at least know someone struggling without proper care? There are better alternatives to the current system! The NHS and Canada’s systems have their flaws, and taxes are higher in France, but these are proof that viable systems where all citizens have access to care exist! And it’s a “public option” we’re looking at, not even a single-payer system, and the option is intended to make health insurance companies more competitive, which theoretically will motivate them to cover more people in an effort to get more business. (You don’t even have to get health care from the government! You can still get it from your profit-motivated insurance company if that’s what you want! Crazy, right?)

So what’s with all the crazy at the town halls?

A lot of the misinformation has already been widely debunked, but there are a few things happening that hit me. First, there’s this lady crying about wanting her country back. Yeah, how do you think I feel, lady? Bush spent 8 years in office after the questionable election of 2000, but Obama’s in office for 8 months and people are crying. It’s hard not to imagine that part of her sobbing here is related to thinking that Obama is an illegitimate president, or that he’s hijacked the country somehow, which I can’t help but think is an argument built at least in part on racism.

It struck me today when reading about Katy Abram, a woman who became an instant pundit by attending a town hall, that if we did a better job teaching our citizens about our history and the way our government really works, this debate would be a different beast. Abram has been all over the cable news, and it’s clear from watching the clips that she’s well-meaning but doesn’t have much grasp on what the real issues are or even American history. Her argument is that universal health care is not constitutional. I think she misunderstands the constitution.

I’ve seen it quoted by some of the astro-turfers that Jefferson advocated periodic revolutions. (If you can call some shouting at the urging of right-wing corporate groups and talk-radio jockeys a “revolution.”) Jefferson was obviously an advocate of revolution since he participated in one. I think Jefferson would be surprised that the Constitution he helped write is still the one we follow, because he also believed that the Constitution would need to be completely rewritten every so often. He was forward thinking enough to know that the needs of The People would change over time. Medical care in Jefferson’s time was a different beast entirely, so I’m not sure he could have foreseen 21st century healthcare, but it says right there in the preamble to his Constitution that We The People established that Constitution to promote, among other things, the general welfare of the people. That seems plain enough to me.

Some of the people gaining a voice on the cable news cycles are people like Orly Taitz, Queen of the Birthers, who came across as completely unhinged in this Salon interview. And people follow her I think in part because they don’t know better. Rachel Maddow showed a poll on her show last night indicating that something like 12% of the American people didn’t think or weren’t sure that Hawaii was a state. Hawaii became a state in 1959, 2 years before Obama was born there. You know, I’ve got one of those Certificate of Live Birth thingies. Mine is from the state of Ohio, which is where I was born, and I got it before a trip I made to Canada in 1996, back when a birth certificate was all you needed to cross the border. If mine was good enough to get me back into the states after the sojourn to Quebec, Obama’s is good enough to prove he’s the president.

How much is racism the motivation behind the birther movement, a way to give legitimacy to the argument that a black man is not qualified to be president? More to the point, why do people with views as out there as Taitz’s have a voice in the national media at all?

The birthers and the astro-turfer anti-healthcare-reform people are related in that both have movements that are gaining momentum based on a platform of misinformation, ignorance, and misplaced anger. I wish the news media would just stop paying attention to any of them, because it makes them think they’re winning, and then it all just gets more ridiculous. It distorts the debate. I’d bet the majority of Americans, those of us with first-hand experience with how fucked the current health care situation is in this country, those of us who react negatively to violence, those of us who took the time to find out what’s really in the bill, we want real reform. We are not represented in the media, not even in the liberal media. Rachel Maddow, even, has spent a lot of time each night on the hijinks at the town halls.

Incidentally, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is on Maddow right now saying that this nonsense detracts from the debate, and he points out that the US spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, and 45 million people are still uninsured. THANK YOU, Bernie Sanders. Why are we even arguing about this?

Bonus links!
GOP is kind of looking the other way when the town halls get violent. (Apparently Obama gets 30 death threats a day!)

Betsy McCaughey derailed health care reform during the Clinton administration and she’s doing it again. James Fallows says that he thought contemporary methods of disseminating information meant that lies wouldn’t get any traction. Whoops!

A primer on the Tea Parties. “A day after one of North Dakota’s largest-ever tea parties, at the courthouse in Grand Forks, the only thing I can say with certainty about the movement is that it’s mostly about making funny signs and producing lots of unintentional irony. And anger. Plentiful, seething, soul-rooted and only vaguely-focused anger. And maybe racism.”

Also, I’m wondering if these guys have never heard the Nazi Rule of Internet Debates, which states that “Once you invoke Hitler or the Nazis, the debate is over.” Whosoever mentions Hitler or the Nazis first effectively shuts down the debate, because you can’t argue with them after that. So… Obama is like Hitler? Is that the current meme? Because he wants a public option for non-old people so that they can enjoy the same kind of health care that most senior citizens enjoy under Medicare. Because the new bill covers the time your doctor spends helping you write a living will so that you can have control over what happens to you should you become unable to make your own medical decisions? I’ve got some bones to pick with Obama, but really? Really?

So: the Nazi rule states that you can’t argue with these people anymore. End of debate.

I heard someone say the other day that, when we elected Obama, a Democrat, we did it because we wanted to be governed by Democrats. Some of us wanted a government made up of appointees who were all for women’s rights (including the right to choose), marriage equality, universal health care, the end to torture, and the whole shebang. So why does Obama keep adhering to some misguided sense of bipartisanship. Bipartisanship? That’s not what we want. All those lovely things you promised in the campaign? Progressive leadership, change, that’s what we want.

Courtesy of the shuffle function on my iPod, I was reminded today that my favorite song from the musical On the Town is “Let’s Go to My Place,” in which a young soldier gets into a cab and lists all the things he wants to see in New York, and the saucy female hack informs him that all of those things are closed, but there’s lots to “see” if he goes on back to her place… if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

Fitting, since it was just Fleet Week. I don’t know about you, but I love Fleet Week. One of my friends complained that there were sailors all over the city—few things are a bigger nuisance to a New Yorker than a preponderance of out-of-towners—but… there were sailors all over the city.

But then a friend of mine said to me on Saturday that she hated Fleet Week because seeing all the sailors left a bad taste in her mouth: she’d soured on the military in general because of all the news of late of atrocities committed, especially on women, by soldiers.

We’ve had this argument before. I won’t name my friend, but she knows who she is. We’ve basically agreed to disagree on matters military, because I don’t think we’ll ever see eye-to-eye, but we respect each other’s opinions. On Saturday, I dutifully argued what I always do: that I know (and am related to) many fine members of the armed forces so I can verify that there are many really great men and women serving right now, and that the truly awful situation of sexual assault and other atrocities at the hands of our troops is created, at least in part, by stress and peer pressure: some of the men abroad, the very men committing these atrocities, have been in Iraq a tour or three longer than they really should have, and it’s a tough, highly stressful situation, and sometimes men break under such difficult circumstances. Which obviously doesn’t excuse heinous behavior, but some of it could have been prevented if, you know, we hadn’t gotten into this ridiculous war to begin with.

I was dismayed to learn that some of the photos Barack Obama decided not to release may or may not show American soldiers raping prisoners. If it’s true, it’s horrifying and heartbreaking. But what I don’t agree with is the liberal/feminist blogosphere going bonkers and making blanket generalizations about the troops.

I can concede that there is much broken in the military. We can sit here and list policies we disagree with: recruitment techniques, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the treatment of female troops, etc. It’s leadership that’s the problem, though, not the troops themselves. Let’s get that straight.

I don’t mean to pick on any one blogger, but here are some posts I ran into today that prompted this (well-tempered, don’t you think?) rant.

I hate to pick on Tiger Beatdown, because I only recently discovered this blog and have enjoyed it immensely, but she says:

Not to point out that military culture is tied to the performance of a very specific, very violent form of masculinity in which to be a “pussy” or a “bitch” or a “faggot” is the worst thing imaginable, that it is a culture that promotes and tolerates pro-rape attitudes, that it is a culture that promotes and tolerates rape. Not to point out that military culture systematically cuts the hearts out of our young men and women, makes them into sociopaths and racists and misogynists and sadists and murderers, in the service of allowing them to more efficiently torture and kill an Other, because recognizing the Other’s humanity would only slow our boys down. Not to point out that rape is inevitably a part of war, that rape is a weapon of war. No. None of those would be the most direct consequence.

Just… no. No doubt there’s misogyny in the ranks, no doubt some people are corrupted by their experiences, but it’s slander to make a statement like this as regards all troops, that vaguely defined “military culture” makes “sociopaths and racists and misogynists and sadists and murderers.” In my, albeit limited, experience, this is just not the case.

There’s a car I walk by almost every day that’s got a bunch of Army stickers in the window and a bumper sticker that says, “Thank a Vet!” I want to! I know a few Iraq war vets, their experiences vary, but these are good people who sometimes fought in a war they didn’t believe in because they thought their work would help keep us safe at home. I also thought today of this guy who lived in my dorm when I was in college. He was in the reserves, and he’d get all decked out in his uniform every so often to go report for duty. It was kind of wild to see the crisp uniform, because this guy mostly wore pajamas around the dorm otherwise. He was a really sweet guy, too, as I recall. He was in the reserves partly so the Army would pay for his degree, but he got something significant out of it, too. You know, “military culture” is also full of discipline and camaraderie and friendship and the value of teamwork and hard work.

I never supported the war, but I do support the troops and veterans. They didn’t start the war, a lot of them got and are getting a raw deal. I realize everyone’s horrified and angry at what these photos may or may not contain, and I recognize that, but let’s not go over the edge and start making pronouncements about how the whole military is like this. It’s a subset, a few men who behaved abominably. If prisoners were raped, let the rapists be court martialed and punished. Let’s not punish the whole dang military.

The greater offense seems to be that Obama won’t release the photos. (There is some interesting stuff in the post linked about the conflation of photos of rape and pornography, FYI.) Personally, I respect Obama’s decision. I certainly don’t want to see the photos, the fact that any photos of what happened at Abu Ghraib exist is enough for me. Atrocities were committed there. If Obama thinks releasing them creates a hazardous situation for the troops still fighting abroad, as he’s argued, then fine. The mere discussion of the photos’ existence has created plenty of anti-military backlash (I’ve seen it all over the web today), which doesn’t do anybody any good. Let’s not make the soldiers’ job harder worse, eh?

I mean, let’s change the military where we’re able. End the war, try those accused of crimes, eliminate Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, etc. Don’t let military leaders condone bad behavior.

My boss thought today’s events were significant enough that she let us all gather around a TV to watch the Inauguration. I will admit to getting a little teary-eyed during Obama’s speech. I don’t want to gush, but, you know, it’s awesome and inspiring. I’ve been thinking about the momentousness of the occasion, but not writing about it, I think just because I don’t know what I can contribute to the discussion, beyond that all this attention, the pomp and circumstance, the way people are coming together, it’s amazing, one of those moments I’ll be able to tell my hypothetical future children about one day.

I choose to be optimistic. There’s so much work to be done, so much change that needs to be enacted, and I think it will be difficult and slow going, but I think President Obama (can you believe it?) is a move in the right direction.

So let’s be positive. Cynicism and despair can resume tomorrow.

Wrote this one last week, but it mysteriously didn’t post. Sorry about that.

I’ve got a backlog of things to write about. So, in brief:

+ Interview with Tony Morrison in which she talks about her new novel and also President Obama.

+ Cats who Twitter.

+ I thought it was a truth universally acknowledged that baseball was not actually invented by Abner Doubleday and that it was based on a British game, but some dude is using a mention of “base-ball” in Northanger Abbey to prove that the Brits invented America’s pastime. Well, whatever, the first organized baseball game happened at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. We can argue about the relative American-ness of New Jersey at a later time.

+ Fun fact: the Department of Homeland Security thinks that a 100-mile-think border around the US shall be a zone in which you can be searched. The ACLU is calling this the Constitution-Free Zone. This is, sadly, not as surprising as it should be. What is amazing? Two-thirds of the American population lives in this zone. Think about that for a moment.

I waited in line for an hour and half to vote this morning. You can see photos of The Line on my Flickr.

I’m now at my brother’s place in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. We’re watching the returns. I’ll update this post as funny and/or surprising things happen. Stay tuned!

7:50: Some reporter on MSNBC is demonstrating the confounding ballots in Florida. My brother says, “Why the fuck do they do this to the old people?” It’s true, it’s like the people in Florida deliberately tried to find the most confusing ballots ever. You’d think they’d learn. In New York, we still have the really old voting machines that were built ca. the Stone Age. They work reliably!

All these swing states leaning McCain (Virginia, etc.) are making me nervous. I guess we’ll know more in a few minutes.

8:05: Pennsylvania Victory Dance!!

9:08: No real surprises on the map at this point. Chuck Todd on MSNBC is saying it’s a lot closer than everyone was expecting. I start chewing on my nails.

9:22: Obama wins Ohio!! Terrorist fist bumps all around!

9:31: New Mexico! Dancy Dance!

9:42: Chuck Todd rescinds what he said about this looking a lot like the 2000 and 2004 race. Ohio and New Mexico seemed to have turned the tides.

10:00: Iowa! And we switch from MSNBC to Stewart/Colbert.

10:20: Elizabeth Dole loses. Steve Forbes is on the Daily Show.

10:54: You know, if Obama wins California, Washington, and Oregon, this show is done. We’re getting the champagne ready. My brother says, “You know what’s refreshing? We might find out who wins before midnight.”

11:00: We switch back to MSNBC, where they’re getting all wistful about the Obama presidency. Done deal? Here comes the polls closing at 11: OBAMA WINS IT!!!!

11:02: Speech! Speech! Speech! My brother is apparently incapable of opening a bottle of champagne. Oh, wait… we seem to have broken a glass in the process, but we have champagne now. People are cheering out in the streets. Cell phone reception isn’t working because everyone in the country is calling each other.

I gotta say, it’s pretty exciting!

11:16: There’s an incredible amount of noise coming from the streets. There’s a lady down there banging two pots together. People are shouting out their windows. MSNBC calls Florida for Obama!! There’s even a collective cheer of O-Ba-Ma from the streets!! Jesse Jackson is crying on the TV!

11:18: McCain concedes!

11:30: There is literal dancing in the streets.

11:45: There are firecrackers outside!

12:00: Obama acceptance speech. Yeah, bitches. It’s a good speech.

I’m voting for Joe Biden’s teeth.

I got an inflammatory comment about ACORN, so let’s look at the truth.

It’s clear that ACORN is being set up as the culprit for McCain’s loss, should that be the way the election goes. Maybe ACORN is guilty of unsavory practices, and there are investigations pending, but 1) as Obama pointed out in the debate Wednesday, his campaign is not actually affiliated in any way with the organization, and 2) as Lindsay points out, fictional registrants don’t vote, you know? The scandal seems to boil down to people who worked for ACORN signing up a few extra people to vote more than once to fill a quota, but you still can’t vote more than once at the polls.

See also Slate.

So, whoop-dee-doo. Some scandal. Maybe we should talk about the thousands of poor minorities who have been disenfranchised in previous elections. Oh, but why would we do that, when they would have voted Democrat?!