We’re coming  to the wire on health care reform and it’s time for all hands to get into the game. On Friday, my wife called our Cabell County congressman’s office, Nick Jo Rahall, to urge him to vote for the health care bill coming up in the house next week and opponents had so far outnumbered those in favor. That’s the Tea Party illuminati in action. Get the progressive vote in action in response.

Call your Congressional rep’s office today to urge their support of health car reform. For a full list of congressional names and phone numbers, go to Congress.org. Type in your rep’s name and it’ll pop up an information page that includes a phone contact. Don’t know who your representative is? Enter your zip code and it will tell you.

There is no arguing with those whose views on this bill (and Obama) have been fixed in fear and loathing, through being Fox-ified, Becked and Limbaughed. Some have said Fox News is the propaganda arm of the Republican Party. But it’s more correct to say Fox is the PR department of unbridled, unregulated corporate power. The contemporary GOP is just Saruman’s voice whose concealed message mouths the anthem of its corporate masters, “Bottom Line Uber Alles.” If you want a shorthand for how Republicans view your health care troubles, Steven Pearlstein has it:

The most important thing Republicans think is that if there are Americans who can’t afford the insurance policies that private insurers are willing to offer, then that’s their problem — there’s nothing the government or the rest of us should do about it….That was their clear message Thursday [at the White House health care summit]. It was their message during all those years when their party controlled Congress and the White House and they did nothing and said nothing about the plight of the uninsured. And it is clear that they would continue to do nothing if, by some miracle, Democrats were to drop their plan or embark on a more modest approach. For Republicans, the uninsured remain invisible Americans, out of sight and out of mind.

But some on the Left oppose the bill, too, or may be tempted to sit back and not urge their congresspeople and friends to support it as it is not an ideal bill. They must take into account the fundamental reforms right out of the box with this bill. Then be aware of the history of all  momentous social legislation, which has often begun with significant baby steps, then changed everything over time. As Kevin Drum writes at his Mother Jones blog:

Look at virtually every other advanced economy in the world. They started off with small programs and grew them over time. Germany spent over a century getting to universal healthcare. France started after World War II and didn’t finish until 1999. In Canada, national healthcare started in Saskatchewan in 1946, spread to the other provinces over the next couple of decades, and became Medicare in 1984. The trend here is pretty obvious: once people get a taste of universal healthcare, they like what they see and they don’t stop until the job is finished.

But the United States is different! Fine. Take a look at social programs in the United States. Social Security provided meager benefits and only modest coverage when it was first passed. Over the course of the next 40 years it became a full-fleged universal pension plan. Medicare passed in 1965 with a limited payment structure and has been improved ever since. Prescription drug coverage wasn’t added until 2003. You see a similar direction for things like federal home loan programs, civil rights measures, S-CHIP, gay rights, and practically every other social program ever passed. Progress is uneven, and sometimes even goes backward, but the general trend is pretty clear.

Once healthcare reform is passed, everyone will breathe a sigh of relief and move on to other issues. Republicans will huff and puff, but they don’t have the votes to overturn it and they know it. (Why do you think they’re resisting it so rabidly? They know perfectly well that entitlement programs practically never go away once they’ve been passed.) Then, down the road, future congresses will start to make changes. Maybe a Medicare buy-in. Maybe bigger subsidies. Maybe a public option outside of Medicare. It won’t happen overnight, but within 20 or 30 years the current bill will almost certainly turn into de facto national healthcare. It’s likely to be based on private health insurers in some way, but that’s how they do it in Germany and the Netherlands too, and it works fine. Eventually it’ll work fine here too.

For those who argue the bill is watered-down and flawed, here is Drum’s “nickel summary” of what it will bring into being, which is far, far better than the mess we have now:

• Insurers have to take all comers.  They can’t turn you down for a preexisting condition or cut you off after you get sick or lose your job.
• Community rating.  Within a few broad classes, everyone gets charged the same amount for insurance.
• A significant expansion of Medicaid.
• Subsidies for low and middle income workers that keeps premium costs under 10% of income.
• Limits on ER charges to low-income uninsured emergency patients.
• Mandates minimum levels of coverage.
• Caps on out-of-pocket expenses.
• A broad range of cost-containment measures.
• A dedicated revenue stream to support all this.

Pass the bill. And Yes, the Heathcare Bill Really Pays for Itself.

As someone haltingly moving toward launch of an online podcast and video space opera called “Saint Stephen’s Dream,” I happened across this remarkable Vimeo sci-fi tale called “Ark.” And had this reaction: ‘OMG-OMG-this-is-so-amazing-I-should-never-deign-to-think-of-putting-my-pitiful-work-out-there-when-other-folks-are-doing-stuff-like-this.’ (This reaction, by the way, is a certifiable entry in the DSM, known as OMGOMG TISA ISNDTTOP MPWOTWO FADSLT Syndrome. Just so know). Watch it and weep. PS | View it in a much bigger, more satisfying HD player directly on Vimeo:

ARK from grzegorz jonkajtys on Vimeo.

Ah, now this article works in tandem with Jon Stewart’s nutritous takedown of Glenn Beck this week. Howell Raines, former executive editor of the New York Times, asks in the March 14, 2010 Washington Post, a fine question in an op-ed titled:

Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?”

Read the whole piece here, but here’s an excerpt:

… Why can’t American journalists steeped in the traditional values of their profession be loud and candid about the fact that (Rupert) Murdoch does not belong to our team? His importation of the loose rules of British tabloid journalism, including blatant political alliances, started our slide to quasi-news. His British papers famously promoted Margaret Thatcher’s political career, with the expectation that she would open the nation’s airwaves to Murdoch’s cable channels. Ed Koch once told me he could not have been elected mayor of New York without the boosterism of the New York Post.

As for Fox’s campaign against the Obama administration, perhaps the only traditional network star to put Ailes on the spot, at least a little, has been his friend, the venerable Barbara Walters, who was hosting ABC’s Sunday morning talk show. More accurately, she allowed another guest, Arianna Huffington, to belabor Ailes recently about his biased coverage of Obama. Ailes countered that he should be judged as a producer of ratings rather than a journalist — audience is his only yardstick. While true as far as it goes, this hair-splitting defense purports to absolve Ailes of responsibility for creating a news department whose raison d’etre is to dictate the outcome of our nation’s political discourse.

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party. And let no one be misled by occasional spurts of criticism of the GOP on Fox. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation. (more…)

“AND NOW LISTEN: THE RULE OF THE FINAL INCH! The realm of the Final Inch! In the language of Maximum Clarity it is immediately clear what that is. The work has been almost completed, the goal almost attained, everything completely right and the difficulties overcome. But the quality of the thing is not quite right. Finishing touches are needed, maybe still more research. In that moment of fatigue and self-satisfaction it is especially tempting to leave the work without having attained the apex of quality. Work in the area of the Final Inch is very, very complex and also especially valuable, because it is executed by the most perfected means. In fact, the rule of the Final Inch consists in this: not to shirk this crucial work. Not to postpone it, for the thoughts of the person performing the task will then stray from the realm of the Final Inch. And not to mind the time spent on it, knowing that one’s purpose lies not in completing things faster but in the attainment of perfection.”

~ DMITRI SOLOGDIN, Chapter 24
from “The First Circle” by Alexsandr I. Solzhenitsyn (more…)

How utterly cool — literally. For $10 a ticket, you enter the Crystal Grotto theater carved out of ice (seats 125 cold people),  where musicians play music on instruments  made out of ice, atop a ski lift in Beaver Creek, Colorado. It’s billed as “North America’s only performing arts center created from ice,” which sounds like a pretty safe bet.

I’ve been blogging regularly for several weeks now after years of wondering whether and how to start. I still haven’t figured it out. Figured out what? The strange, neurotic landscape that comes with hanging out your blogging shingle. I’ve taken to obsessively checking my hit counts. Figuring out what bumps the count upward by a few dozen pageviews. Why the angular graph tracking the counts daily in my Wordpress.com Stats plug-in languishs or stalls out. What people react to. Whether I’ve become a cheap hit-count whore.

Part 2 in an ongoing, navel-reflecting, hit-count-hopeful, insomnia-driven reflection on the act of blogging. Part 1: ‘Blogging = Streaking.’

The bulk of bloggers, I suppose, command audiences that consist of handfuls of occasional readers and a sprinkle of devoted, faithful friends (Hi, Karan-a-go-go! Hey, Captain La La!). At this early stage and level of blogging it is perhaps presumptuous to call them ‘fans.’ Plus, a few pals or fellow travelers may be devoted as they are obscure bloggers, too, checking their own hit counts and wondering whether they are going to be epic fails like you as a blogger. So, it’s like a support group. Bloggers Anonymous.

That word, ‘anonymous,’ gets at some of the strangeness of trying to blog. The fact of the matter is that most bloggers are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous within the cavernous, cacophonous, 24-7 Wal-Mart of the Web. Really, when only 17 people check in with you all day on Feb. 28, 2010 (see graph below),  and one of them is your brother and the other is your fellow ‘epic fail-fearing fellow blogger,’ you can say any ridiculous old thing. It’s not like the world’s paying attention. But, see, that’s the rub. If you do go ahead and post something foolish, earnest and awful, the world or at least a colleague or your mother, (were she still on this mortal coil, God rest her soul), could be paying attention with just an e-mail or stray link (‘OMG, look at this...’). Foolishness and Ridicule are two louts always hanging around the corner in Blogland.

Of course, one’s hit counts, if they languish in numbers that reflect the candles on a teenager’s birthday cake, could have to do with the fact you publish a crushingly booo-o-ring blog. Or one that Doesn’t Speak to Me. Or that 65 visitors daily is better than the 32 when you first started and actually, quite a lot when you consider that that nice old lady, Myrtle, at the dry cleaners on the corner doesn’t have anybody reading her thoughts. Or that all of this is immaterial in the end, everything is an ever-dissolving mirage and that we are all really just ‘Dust in the Wind,’ yes, we are dust in the wind. I’m down with that; I get the whole annica thing.

But please, can more than 17 of you show up today? Thanks, man. (And good morning bro. And Karan. And Captain La La.)

Hit counts since the start of my illustrious blogging career. In my defense for today (which shows, like, 1 measly hit), I am writing this in the pre-dawn hours, stricken with insomnia. My friend(s) and whomever else will wander in today haven’t woken up yet. Though, if you live in France, you should be up already, having a croissant and jam and hot chocolate, and could be reading this blog were there anything about your world of interest in it. Perhaps there is!