There's a lot of rally and rhetoric in DeMint's Freedom Alert [shudder] today, but it also contains everything that a conscientious right-wing know-it-all needs to badger his coworkers tomorrow on Casual Friday.  DeMint's actually better at this than a lot of his colleagues.  He frames the situation like this: 

Last month, Senator Ted Kennedy offered a glimpse of what they have in mind when called for the creation an optional, "public health insurance plan, where coverage is provided in the public interest." That may sound nice, but in one sentence, it describes everything that is wrong with a government take-over of American health care. Health care, by definition, can't be provided in the public interest because no doctor has ever seen "the public."  Doctors see patients: one at a time, providing personal care in the patient's interest only.

After trailing off about "public" and "personal" (and frankly sounding a little buzzed), DeMint goes into how much the program will cost--something sure to resonate with a broad range of conservatives, crazy and sane alike:

They talk a lot more about costs than they do about care.  Only . . . the government is the reason that costs are spiraling out of control now.  Government now covers 100 million Americans, and costs are exploding.  Under the proposed takeover, 130 million more will be added to government health programs. 

Finally he gets to what may become the right wing's slogan during the health care debate in the coming months: rationing care.

How can they expect to get costs under control by doubling the government's role in health care?  The answer is by rationing care.  If government wants to cover 230 million Americans and bring down costs, the only way it can possibly do it is denying care to people whose health care is deemed - you guessed it - not in the public interest.

Now that that's taken care of, DeMint goes through a couple of totally unsurprising points.  First, long lines:

Under similar schemes in Canada and Great Britain, people wait weeks to see their doctors, months to see specialists, and years to get routine procedures and treatments.  High-tech tests and breakthrough medicines are off-limits because the government decides - in the public interest - that they are too expensive.  When the late actress Natasha Richardson suffered her skiing accident in Canada this spring, the hospital didn't have an MRI machine.  The doctors never knew her injuries were life-threatening... until it was too late.  That's how a government take-over of your health care will try to get costs under control: cheap, outdated treatments, long waiting lists, and low-tech hospitals.  It won't take long before families realize the true costs of such a plan aren't counted in dollars and sense.

Finally, DeMint warns us not to empower the government with health care:

Instead of the government-controlled "public option," we should move toward a "personal option," where we help individuals and families buy and own their own health insurance plan that no government can ever take-over or take away. [...] Any law that empowers government to provide health care in the public interest implicitly empowers government to deny it for the same reason.

My question to you all: is there any easy retort to any of this?  Are there actually any good points buried in there?  Thoughts? 

"Won't somebody please think of the children!?"

The Helen Lovejoys on the right have been working for a long time to dredge up the worst instincts from the bottoms of Americans' souls when it comes to the Obama administration. For example, an expansion of Americorps, which Obama advocated during his campaign,has drawn flies in "real America" for kinda-sorta seeming like a scary paramilitary movement on the rise.

Granted, the loony left plays these scaremongering games, too--remember Naomi Wolf's coup talk during the month or so before the election? Yikes!

But this time, elected officials like Michelle Bachmann--a member of the House of Representatives--has gone around making public accusations that her colleagues are engaged in un-American activities and want to send young Americans to re-education camps.

Bachmann is not Michael Savage. Not your crazy uncle.  She is an elected official.

Those of you who aren't familiar with the Godwinian lawbreaking that's transpired with the Obama-as-Sinister-Pied-Piper idea should see for yourself what the words "Obama," "Hitler," and "Youth" bring you in a Google search.

But to most of you, this is all old news.  And to some of you--particularly those most critical of Obama--you must be quite tired of hearing about the lunatic fringe all the time, particularly when it is all too easy for Obama supporters to make a tidy dichotomy between virtuously faithful support [read: uncritical following or "Kool-Aid chugging"] and the "bad guys."  Let no one make this mistake!  Obama's BMs stink just like yours, and he's done plenty wrong so far as President.  That's one thing we should be able to agree with the right-wing crazies on: Obama is not a Morgan Freeman character.  There, I said it.

Some folks on the right, however, react a little differently to this, according to a article in this morning's NY Times.  While we fax our representatives, the right has decided to answer the alleged Obama Youth with its own juvenile Heimwehr.

Some choice snippets:

"This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl," said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff's deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run.

[...]

Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns. The group uses compressed-air guns -- known as airsoft guns, which fire tiny plastic pellets -- in the training exercises, and sometimes they shoot real guns on a closed range. "I like shooting them," Cathy said. "I like the sound they make. It gets me excited."

[...]

In a competition in Arizona that he did not oversee, Deputy Lowenthal said, one role-player wore traditional Arab dress. "If we're looking at 9/11 and what a Middle Eastern terrorist would be like," he said, "then maybe your role-player would look like that. I don't know, would you call that politically incorrect?"

I put myself on Michelle Bachmann's e-mail list, mainly because her rhetoric seems to approach the most reprehensible that today's elected officials can get away with.  It's useful, I think, to keep an eye on how that rhetoric develops.  Some highlights:

• The House just voted to "fund ACORN," after Barney Frank succeeded with his "ACORN amendment."  Bachmann, of course, was a major opponent.  She ends her bit on ACORN with a gloomy eye to America's dark future: "If Congress can't draw the line with funding for organizations investigated for criminal activities in more than a dozen states, where will it draw the line?"
• Bachmann warns of a coming "debate over socialized medicine."  She's worried that "this will mean rationed care, especially for the most vulnerable; reduced consumer choices; and an inefficient and ineffective delivery of the very best medical care in the world."  More than this, though, she expresses concern that national healthcare--I'm sorry, "socialized medicine"--will go the way of Medicare.  By which she means this:

Take Medicare as an example.  When it was created in 1965, it was said to be a backstop.  Benefits were limited and retirees actually paid a significant portion of the costs.  That year, Medicare was estimated to cost $3.1 billion by 1970.  But it actually came in at $6.8 billion.  Today, it costs $455 billion and the costs continue to rise substantially.

• She goes on to quote the WSJ: "This one is about whether to turn 17% of the U.S. economy entirely and permanently into the arms of the government."
• Number of instances in which "Democrat" is used as an adjective: 2