What does it look like? 

Is there a receptionist?

Is it one long corridor of cubicles that leads to Dick Day's office? 

Does Bwak leave a trail of feathers behind?

Does Strato fly in on a velvet cloud, drop off her copy, then fly off into the grand blue sky?

What happened that morning Obey walked in and found Lalo sitting in his Eames leaning chair?

How many times has middleclassbill pounded on LisB's wall asking her to turn the music down?

Is Oldengoldendecoy chiseling out cafe recommend rules on the ceiling?

Is Jason Everett Miller cursing at the person who, once again, left off a t while mis-stenciling his middle name on his office door?

What do we all wear on casual Fridays?

Do we have a ping pong table?  If we do, who's the best player?  Johnnienohands?

Is the cleaning lady who comes in at night actually davidfarrar in drag disguise?

Has Josh ever been to the TPM blogger's imaginary office?

Is Ramona's office really big enough for a Democrat wide intervention?  

Are Professor Amike, Flowerchild, Miguel, Synch, Old Grouch, Ripper and Aunt Sam, all sitting in the conference room but not sure who called the meeting?

Does Thera have an honorary corner office?  With a couch?

And who has the trap door beneath his/her cubicle that leads to a secret dungeon, with shackles and leg irons tailor made for Blunderdick and Widdle Dub?

Okay, I'm sorry not to have mentioned everyone else by name. (And everyone else by name knows who they are. I haven't even mentioned me, so don't feel bad.)  But feel free to chime in and help give me an idea of what our office space looks like.  

Maybe someone can volunteer to draw up a colorful blueprint once we solicit enough machinations on what the place looks like.  
 

Some reporter-blogger-journalist-Twitterer overhears someone close to the White House saying one thing or another about health reform, then publishes it and the whole blogosphere starts hyperventilating.  

Seems like there are tinier and tinier bits of information floating around the inter-webs.  Parsed and re-parsed.  Snippets of things beltway ring leaders say or intimate, often anonymously, from which we try and create a narrative.

Whole thoughts are rarely captured. We're down to microscopic. Pieces. Of. Thought. that get distributed and repeated every nanosecond of every minute of every day.

And they are little bits and bytes; a Hannity-style video splice from a speech President Obama once gave as a Senator three years ago, an edited quote attributed to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, five words from Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.  

Round and round they go, where they stop nobody knows.

This seems to confirm yesterday's fragment of a sound byte taken from something Marc Ambinder thought he overheard Glenn Greenwald infer from what White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs seems to have implied in answer to a question that wasn't actually asked by MSNBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd.

Granted, it would be great if what President Obama and his cabinet said was strong unambiguous and consistent. And they definitely need to work on that. 

But maybe we all need to work on taking some things that are reported--no, not some things, lots of things-- with a grain of salt.  

Let's take a collective breath every now and then.  

Let's take into greater consideration the motives of those that would love to misinform, misquote, and mix mash and mire otherwise simple declarative intelligent statements coming from anyone with a (D) affixed to their name for the sole purpose of creating mass hysteria. To demonize, delay and grind to a complete standstill the slightest sign of progress. To attain the merely reflexive goal of snuffing out anything that has the faint pulse of hope.

Maybe we need to do a better job of editing out the madness.  Otherwise, we're really not communicating at all.  

And this is all just an exercise in circulating binary code.

We tend to underestimate our power as Americans.  And in this case, as consumers of health insurance.  

Right now, it seems that our elected representatives are thinking about dropping the public option from health reform legislation.  Senator Kent Conrad, whose fat wallet is made possible by Blue Cross Blue Shield, Amgen, New York Life Insurance and Kindred HealthCare, to name a few, is dead set against a public option.  

If beltway ring leaders can threaten to drop the public option, why can't we all threaten to drop the private option, as a counterpoint?   

Consider this:  We are the only consumers the health insurance industry can offer its products to. (It's not like there's a global demand for private insurance--virtually ever other country has some version of universal health care, or single payer.) 

We have more power than we realize.  It's unfortunate that we can't seem to win debates as citizens.  As average Americans.    

But as consumers, we are anything but average.  We are powerful.  

If we can boycott Whole Foods, or pressure advertisers to drop Glenn Beck, why can't we arrange a "Drop The Private Option" Day?

I recognize this is difficult.  How can people go without health insurance? 

Well, people are losing their health insurance every day.  They are either being dropped as a result of practices like rescission.  Or they are electing to drop their insurance because they can't afford the premiums and they are going bankrupt.  

Let's just make arrangements to do it all together on the same day.  

This is already an unsustainable system.  

So it's almost like a game of chicken.  

Who will balk first?

It's been referred to as health reform legislation but it should really be called anti-health crimes legislation.  Because what we have in America is a medical industrial complex that operates like a crime syndicate.  

Big Pharma has a nasty habit of manufacturing its research, not just its drugs.  It changes one molecule in an anti-depressant to save it from the threat of generics, calls it a breakthrough and continues to charge you a fortune for it. 

Not exactly the kind of ingenuity that America is known for, is it? Actually, it's precisely the ingenuity that America has become known for.  Look at the auto industry and the energy industry, not just the health care industry--public and private policy has one mantra--make money, not progress.  It's a mentality that is counter to creating anything cutting edge, counter to sustaining anything that is world leading.  

It generates cash, not vision.  

Corporations and government have colluded in this big money, small idea system and it is rapidly destroying our economy.  Our elected representatives are essentially corporate sales representatives.  

But getting back to the mob that owns the health care industry:

Health insurance companies practice rescission.  And we all know how the scam works;  get consumers to pay skyrocketing  premiums for years and when they really need coverage for a serious illness, deny it and drop them completely. Then deny them coverage for the rest of their lives.  

To maintain its stranglehold on Americans, they behave like one giant industry, not like small private companies that compete fairly and offer innovative products for consumers.  

There is no need for a free enterprise when you have a really well-oiled criminal enterprise. 

That brings us to the virtue of a public option.   (Well, virtue if you're one of 300 million American citizens.  If you're a corporate citizen, it's a major problem because it would really destroy the criminal enterprise.)  

The primary purpose of a public option is to provide Americans, all Americans, fair affordable access to health insurance.  And it has to be large enough and influential enough to compete effectively with private insurance.  

But therein lies the problem.  

It means that the private insurance industry would have to compete.  And competing has become un-American.     

That's precisely why, for the White House, the public option has become optional.  
Following in the footsteps of anti-visionaries Kent Conrad and Chuck Grassley, President Obama is now pushing consumer owned non-profit cooperatives, and many believe these cooperatives will lack the negotiating power of size to effectively lower prices.  

Exactly.  

That's the idea.   It reflects America's new rallying cry:  

Never never inspire competition.   

That deal that the White House apparently cut with the Pharma industry is starting to make sense--get the industry to agree to a meager $82 billion in cost cutting over 10 years and promise not to give a not for profit entity the power to negotiate.

The result?  No real competition.  No real innovation. 

What we have now, it seems, is a Democratic majority that represents the corporate minority. 

And when it comes to our health and well-being, that is a crime.  

A crime against humanity.  

This isn't a matter of splitting hairs, as others would have you believe.  

In the next eight weeks, there are only two kinds of legislation that our reps and Senators will be busy crafting:

Pro health crime.  

Or anti-health crime.   

I support anti-health crime legislation.