Woop, there it is!

health care reform passes the house. am i giddy like a school girl? I think we all know the answer to that. Hell yes, I am.

This clip pretty much sums up whats left of the Right. (http://www.politico.com/largevideobox.html?bcpid=15202024001&bclid=1201016315&bctid=73067590001) Tea party folks standing outside the Capital just shouting "No! No! No!" over and over.

Still, there are many battles left to fight. Republicans have been running all over town saying that this will cost people their jobs. Of course, they (and by they I mean Karl Rove) have also been running around making up all sorts of outrageous nonsense, like that the Whitehouse is tellling federal employees to call their congressmen in support of the bill. I'm pretty sure that this would be deeply illegal. I'm positive they have no proof becasue A) they haven't produced any and B) these "emails" were never sent and do not exist. But then if Rove has taught us anything its that the facts (or good sense) need not be on your side. An unsubstantiated rumor, repeated often enough, will convince some people better than facts or, you know, reality ever could. Remember the death pannels? Michelle Bachman sure does.

(Side note, that woman is really beginning to piss me off. Lets all move to her district and get someone sane elected! I could sleep better at night then. who's with me?)

But I digress. My point was this: if we want the people who take the fall for this to be those who stubbornly opposed the measure just to score poltical points rather than those who stood up and did the right thing by the millions left vulnerable by our old health care system and the rapid amount of debt it was putting both families and the country into, then we need to continue to be vocal about this issue. Long after Obama puts pen to paper on this thing (and that will be a very happy day for us formerly-uninsured twenty-somethings) we need to keep talking about the benefits (immediate and long term) of this historic legislation... and the ways we can continue to make it better.

We need to make sure that Americans know that those who opposed this bill all the way did so at the expense of their constituents and their country. They should be made to be feel some heat for this come election time. If enough of them loose seats over this, maybe the remaining Repubs will think twice about their current party motto: Just say no.

A healthy democracy needs a vibrant, active opposition of ideas. Just saying no doesnt make you an opposition force, it makes you a toddler with a temper. If the right can no longer provide any kind of intellectual or political substance, perhaps its time for the left to step in. The centrist Democratic path of the Obama administration would do quite nicely if they were being prodded on by the left instead of the far, far right. Just a thought.

On a side note, Rep. Capito from West Virginia wins honors for one of the worst metaphors i have ever heard. If you can find her anti-reform speech on youtube (shes currently live on CSPAN) its this extended ramble comparing health care reform to a blanket. A yuck, itchy democratic blanket. We apparently deserve an unspecified but decidedly better... blanket. oy.

Ok, ok. Now that the biggest hurdles are over I can stop obsessively blogging about health care reform and get back to my excellent but completely insane life in korea. Like how its currently snowing outside even though it is late March, and how this afternoon there was a fight in one of my classes complete with tears. (I marched the perpetrator down to the office and felt like a real teacher doing it.) But all that is for another day.

Au revoir, mes amies.