Cue the one-note chorus from Colorado Springs...

The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, chaired by Ted Kennedy, hears testimony from Health and Human Services Secretary-Nominee Tom Daschle today. This isn't a confirmation hearing, but it signals the high priority that both Congress and the Obama Administration plan to give to serious health care reform this year.

The prominence of health care on Washington's radar even in the midst of the economic mess should give hope to many Americans (the uninsured, those facing bankruptcy from medical bills, those of us with high-deductible plans that don't cover maternity...).

Leave it to Focus on the Family to try taking everyone's eyes off the ball. Denise Ross (who has some medical bills coming up soon--congratulations and best wishes for a smooth delivery, Denise!) points us toward a screed from the Dobson wolf-PAC exhorting voters to call the senators on the HELP committee and tell them to vote against Daschle's nomination. "Tom Daschle is a disaster appointment," says blogger Jill Stanek in the post. "Daschle ardently supports abortion... and he disdains abstinence education." FotF's Ashley Horne adds, "Citizens who care about family values should be concerned about Daschle's nomination."

Family values? I got your family values right here. While Jom Dobson's minions bloviate, Joe and Missy Urbaniak are fighting to pay their son Cooper's medical bills. Doctors have removed brain and spine tumors from the three-year-old boy, and now say he needs high-dose chemo and a stem-cell transplant. Cost; $400,000. Their insurer, Sanford Health Plan, is refusing to pay for the treatment, saying it's "experimental." A similar treatment worked for a Wisconsin boy, whose family also had to take their insurer to court to get coverage (the family won). The Urbaniaks' lawyer, Mike Abourezk, notes Sanford appears to be doing a selective reading of the medical studies on the treatment, citing only the parts that uphold their rejection [details in "Family Fights for Boy's Cancer Care," Mitchell Daily Republic, 2009.01.07].

Tom Daschle is coming to Washington to work on health care reform that would help Cooper Urbaniak and millions of other Americans get affordable health care without having to take big corporations to court. That sounds like a focus on the family to me. But you won't hear a word about that from the one-note chorus from Colorado Springs.

Jill Stanek claims, "The only reason Obama appointed Daschle was to assure Obama's radical support of the abortion industry would be extended through HHS." That's absurd. But Focus on the Family needs to believe that absurdity. The radical right must cast every government action as part of a war on family values; otherwise, their raison d'être (and raison de fundraising) disappears.

Part of me wishes Jim Dobson would just accept his irrelevance. But another part me hopes he keeps up the nuttery. The more Focus on the Family brays, the more Americans will see the difference between fighting a contrived culture war (that's Dobson's need) and solving practical policy problems (that's Obama and Daschle's plan).

If you really value families, call your senators, and tell them to give two thumbs up to Tom Daschle and health care reform.

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In case you need proof that Stanek, Dobson, et al. live in a reality of their own making: Obama didn't pick Daschle because of abortion. He picked Daschle because Daschle knows how to pass legislation. See this smart piece by Carrie Budoff Brown, "Daschle's Approach: Anything But Clinton," in today's Politico.com.

A Sunday treat: former pastor Ed Dobson (not to be confused with that other Jesus-talking Dobson) spent a year trying to live as Jesus would (following the example of secular Jew A.J. Jacobs, as documented in his book The Year of Living Biblically). Dobson's year included the presidential election. Dobson thought hard about Jesus's life and works, studied the candidates, and then, for the first time in his life, voted for a Democrat, for Barack Hussein Obama:

"I decided since I had read through the gospels at that point over 30 times, I wanted to know who best represented the fundamental teachings of Jesus, and I felt that he more than any other candidate represented the teachings of Jesus, so I voted for him," Dobson said [Jonann Brady, "Spending a Year Living Like Jesus," ABC News: Good Morning America Weekend, 2009.01.04].

Ed Dobson is no casual convert. He studied at ultra-fundie Bob Jones University and was an early mover and shaker in Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. Boy, that Jesus sure makes people do some crazy things, doesn't it?

Come to Jesus, Brother Ed.

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p.s.: Whiners at NewsBusters.org grouse that GMA would probably not give press to "a liberal who'd never voted for a Democrat but who after a year trying to live like Jesus decides to vote for McCain." Well, if you can actually find someone like that, you might have an argument. Find me some and bring 'em to me, and I'll write 'em up. (Sibby, do not put on a wig and pretend to be your liberal cousin from Cambridge.) In the meantime, NewsBusters, have fun with those straw men.

My South Dakota blogging colleague the good Professor Blanchard stays up late to give a drubbing to Caroline Kennedy and her non-electoral quest to become the next Senator from New York. I've made clear previously that I'm not terribly interested in defending the next crown princess of East Coast politics. Caroline Kennedy just isn't a big issue for South Dakota politics. But I can already hear a few commenters sharpening their hypocrisy axes, thinking, "Oh, that Madville Times sure lit into Sarah Palin, but he hasn't said word one about that Kennedy lady," so I guess I'll say something.

I don't know Caroline Kennedy that well, and I don't plan to give her much attention, since she's not asking for my vote. I did listen to the "you know"-filled interview Dr. Blanchard linked and bemoaned, and I too found it uneloquent. On Dr. Blanchard's thesis that Kennedy sounds as unready for prime-time as Palin did in her Couric calamities, I will only note that while Kennedy can be faulted for poor delivery and vagueness, her interviews still aren't quite the exercises in buffoonish and illogical sloganspeak the GOP brought us last fall.

Sure, Caroline Kennedy is a smart woman. But New York's a big state filled with smart people. Governor Paterson could throw a dart at the New York Times and hit a New Yorker just as smart and capable of governing as Caroline Kennedy. Heck, why not appoint New York Times columinst and Nobel laureate in economics Paul Krugman (oops, he lives in New Jersey) or Thomas Friedman (dang! Bethesda, Maryland! but you get the idea... and if Clinton moved, so can these guys).

Or go for smarts and political experience: send NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo--or his dad, ex-governor Mario Cuomo! Send Mayor Ed Koch to raise hell for a couple years. Promote Carolyn Maloney from House to Senate and let Kennedy prove her political chops in a special election for that vacated House seat (so says Gloria Steinem).

But what do I know... or care? From the middle of my snowdrift here in South Dakota, I say New York, do your thing. If name recognition is what you think is in your state's best interest, then Caroline Kennedy is your gal. But in a straight résumé fight, it's hard to see Kennedy coming out on top of the New York political heap.

Prairie Postscript: My South Dakota perspective suggests one reason we might cheer a Caroline Kennedy pick: she will likely not represent New York as effectively as Tim Johnson and John Thune will continue to represent South Dakota. New York trades pit bull Clinton for powder puff Kennedy; that's one less powerful urban interest rural senators have to fight.

What do my wife and I do on New Year's Eve? Think up e-mails on the need for universal health coverage to send to our fellow South Dakotan Tom Daschle and the Obama Administration. Here's a message I submitted this morning through Change.gov. Mr. Daschle, pay attention!

To Secretary-Nominee Tom Daschle:

A friend of ours told us about the hard times her sister and brother-in-law have hit. She is recovering from breast cancer and still undergoing some treatments. Her husband just received a heart transplant Christmas Eve. He has lost his job, because, of course, he missed a lot of work. He has thus also lost his health insurance. Chances of finding an affordable policy that won't exclude either him or his wife are slim to none. His employer-based health plan covered the transplant, but how they'll pay for the follow-up medicines and treatments is anyone's guess.

It occurred to us that if insurance worked the way it was supposed to--a bunch of us pool our money to take care of the few of us each year who will need health care, in return for the promise that if something bad happens to us, we'll be covered--these folks wouldn't have to worry. If they were in my insurance pool, I'd never deny them coverage. I'd say, "You can't work right now? No problem, neighbor. Come in the pool, we'll cover you, and then when you and your wife are better and can contribute to the pool, we'll expect you to help us if we're in a bind."

Why can't we do that? Because we, the insurance purchasers who provide private insurance companies with their capital, aren't the real stakeholders. Private investors buy stocks in health insurance companies, creating a distinct and conflicting interest group. We join the insurance pool for it to function; private investors buy stock in hopes that it won't function (i.e., won't pay out for health care).

I want my health care dollars to go toward health care, toward helping my neighbors, not toward profit. Health insurance should be one giant public pool in which every American pledges to help protect every other American (and anyone else who happens to be our guest).

Single-payer not-for-profit health care: it's decent, it's practical, and it's how insurance is supposed to work.

As we see from the case of of the couple paying bills for breast cancer and a heart transplant, it doesn't make sense to tie health insurance to jobs. You don't deserve health care because you are a good employee. You deserve health care because you are human.

Similar conversation about both the morality and practicality of universal health coverage was on MPR's Midmorning with Kerri Miller yesterday. Give it a listen, then get hold of Tom Daschle yourself and tell him to do health care reform right.

Warning: this post contains content not suitable for younger readers... as unsuitable as John McCain is for the White House.

John McCain's appearance at the Buffalo Chip Campground at the Sturgis rally brought these blatant signs of misogyny from him and his supporters.

• McCain suggests his wife should enter the Miss Buffalo Chip pageant.
  
• McCain suggests buying t-shirts depicting nearly naked women to cheer up the campaign staffers.
• "Show your tits for McCain; show your ass for Obama," read a handmade sign created by McCain fan in the audience (as reported on SDPB's Dakota Digest, 2008.08.05; to be broadcast again at 5:30 CDT).

Misogyny also forms a subtle and deliberate foundation for John McCain's belittling of Barack Obama's energy policy. Growled McCain above the revving Harleys:

We’re not going to pay $4 dollars a gallon for gas (when I am president) because we are going to drill offshore and we are going to drill now. We are doing to drill here and we are going to drill now.... My opponent doesn’t want to drill, he doesn’t want nuclear power. He wants to inflate your tires. [Mosheh Oinounou, "McCain Rallies Bikers at Sturgis," Fox News, 2008.08.04]

[Brace yourself, church ladies.]

Drill here, drill now: a male metaphor for raping the earth. In word choice (one blunt syllable, starting hard, ending soft) and in repetition (McCain says it four times in quick succession), McCain is evoking sexual imagery.

Wanting to "drill" is an expression of male power, and McCain says Obama doesn't want that power, "doesn't want to drill." Instead, Obama wants to "inflate your tires." That mockery intends to evoke an image of a servile, effeminate Obama giving you a blow job.

Think I sound offensive? This is just the coded language of the old white man who wants to be your president... and can cavalierly joke about his wife baring her breasts at the Buffalo Chip. I'm sick of presidential campaigns based on macho BS. It's time to elect a President who respects women, and John McCain's performance at Sturgis yesterday proves he ain't it.