Rep Lynn Woolsey sent me this canned carefully crafted & thoughtful response to my email re: her positions on national health care (emphasis added)

Thank you for sharing your thoughts on improving healthcare. I appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective with me on this important matter.

Like you, I am frustrated with the escalating cost and complications of healthcare in this country. We must find ways to make our healthcare system as high quality and affordable as possible for everyone. Also, we must reform the system so that the forty-eight million Americans who lack health insurance receive high quality coverage, which will bring down the overall costs of medical care.

Congress has begun holding hearings and listening to the suggestions of stakeholders, including doctors, patients, employers, and health insurance companies. These viewpoints and the suggestions of many others will be important voices as we consider health reform. I have supported various federal initiatives, such as H.R. 676, the U.S. National Health Insurance Act, which calls for a single payer national health insurance system. H.R. 676 will help control skyrocketing health costs while restoring choice of physician and the doctor-patient relationship. Many individuals prefer a single payer plan, but that may not be possible at this time. That’s why I have joined with other Members of Congress to advocate for a robust public plan option that can compete with private plans and will give patients the option to choose a public plan or a private plan. You can count on me to continue to be an outspoken voice for universal healthcare and for measures to improve healthcare for everyone.

Again, it’s good to hear from you. The people of Marin and Sonoma counties are the most important voices I listen to as I serve in Congress.

Feel so good to be listened to! Now I know I’m making a difference! My voice has been heard!

Oh wait, the opposite of all of that.

You have to love that in response to me writing this:

As long as the government competes with private companies in a given industry, that industry will suffer and appear “inefficient.”

she reassured me with the fact that she will try harder to “compete with private plans.”

In response to Rep Lynn Woolsey’s  We Need a Real and Robust Public Option:

I do not support the idea of nationalized health care. It is an impossible undertaking and is an irresponsible pursuit in the midst of the current financial climate.

We need to decentralize and decrease the size of the Federal Government, not increase. We need to move more services to the private sector and stop providing services to illegal aliens.

As long as the government competes with private companies in a given industry, that industry will suffer and appear “inefficient.”

Please lower taxes, lower government spending, and put money back in the pockets of individual citizens who can identify and work on their local community’s problems instead of trying to make a one size fits all solution and push the square peg into a round whole.

Please stop wasting your time and taxpayer money.

For some reason, Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net, an ISP based in Northern California - @dane - enjoys slipping in occasional, and sometimes nonsensical, jabs at Christians, pro-lifers, and the Religious Right in his Twitter feed.

Why he thinks this is a good idea is for anyone to guess. He must either

1. presume that no one listening to him is a Christian, nor is anyone offended by the ridiculing thereof; or
2. think it’s good business to make fun of an entire culture in a way completely unrelated to his industry; or
3. think that Christians do not deserve the same respect as other cultures.

Is this a trend? A marketing strategy?

Most likely he assumes that any person in California intelligent enough to read his posts shares his views.

This is not the case, Mr. Jasper. Perhaps you could tone it down.

I voted for Proposition 8. I voted for Proposition 22 in 2000 to make marriage between a man and a woman. Please do not commit this atrocity of governmental bullying and overturn Proposition 8.

If you do, you show the utmost disrespect to the will of the people, to morality, to our country, and to yourselves. You will be nothing more than spoiled, out of touch ideologues forcing your values on your helpless constituency.

When we think of Islamist terrorists, doesn’t our reaction frequently boil down to “hey, what’s their problem? Why don’t they just ‘get democracy,’ move into the 21st Century, leave behind all this primitive religious fervor, and quit killing people?”

Basically: what makes them think there’s something worth fighting over?

The idea that Islamist terrorists don’t have something “worth fighting over” is founded on secular assumptions - that no religion is better than another, or at least that no religion is worth spending your entire life’s energy trying to defend and promote. It is the ultimate arrogance, condescension, and insult to their value as human beings to dismissively say to them that what they believe in is not worth fighting for. If this extreme form of Islam is true (as they believe it is), that we are infidels, that it is their God-given duty to convert or destroy us, then it certainly is worth fighting for. Our very act of dismissal provides fuel for their argument that secular western society is ignorant, relativistic, and has no direction but downward.

The problem is not that these “pre-modern” “savages” have yet to be “enlightened” by the modern (or post-modern) secular western world, or that their impoverished conditions have caused them to lash out at our success. The problem is that their worldview is dangerous, wrong, and evil.

No secular means or democratic solution is going to weaken their resolve. And no watered down “can’t we all just get along” line of diplomatic reasoning will ever have any impact on such zealous individuals.

As Norm mentioned, Republicans have a lot of ground to recover.

Basically liberals have a good story: “we want to help everyone and be really really nice; conservatives don’t want to help anyone, and they’re really really mean.”

When you walk out of a truly enjoyable movie, it’s such a drag to immediately hear someone pointing out all the plot holes. You inevitably view the person as a spoil-sport, even if you know (or suspect) what they’re saying is (or may be) true.

A much better approach is to have a distinct parallel story rather than beating “liberals” over the head with “The Truth.” In the liberal narrative, conservatives are essentially “mean.” Conservatives want to spoil everyone’s fun and force their beliefs on people (e.g. same sex marriage, abortion, helping the poor, immigration, etc.) So to respond defensively, yelling our positions louder and louder, only plays into the hands of those who would paint us as “mean.”

We need to tell our story. We need to show that “fake-helping” the poor (admittedly this phrase could use some work in the niceness department!) by stealing from the rich is in fact not some romantic Robin Hood-inspired utopia, but rather a violation of property rights and an encouragement of irresponsible behavior. We need to (not so directly) challenge the false alternatives of the liberal narrative (e.g. either the government helps the needy or no one helps the needy) without fueling the fire of the “conservatives are mean” line of thinking.

Rather than pointing out all the plot holes in the liberal story line, we need to craft a better, more appealing story line, to get the attention of the Bush-weary nation. And then we need to hold each other accountable to this narrative.

Now if only there existed one remaining creative person in the entire country who hadn’t been thoroughly turned off by conservative meanness…

Democratic legislators ask state Supreme Court to void Prop. 8

Why do we allow ourselves to be surprised by stuff like this?

In their brief, lawmakers described the 500,000-vote margin as a “bare majority,” and said it was “compromising the enduring constitutional promise of equal protection under the law.”

“Proposition 8 seeks to effect a monumental revision of this foundational principle and constitutional structure by allowing a bare majority of voters to eliminate a fundamental right of a constitutionally protected minority group,” the brief says.

So let me get this straight. Previously, the California Constitution explicitly stated that marriage was defined as being between any two consenting adults regardless of sex, is that correct? And the Prop 8 removed that wording and replaced it with the horrible discriminatory “one man and one woman” wording. Right?

How can people throw around such strong phrases when they have absolutely zero bearing on the topic at hand? It’s just astounding to see such cynicism and blindness.

Dear Mr. McCain,

Despite your terrible terrible campaign and your less-than-conservative record, I voted for you as the lesser of two evils, much to the chagrin of Ron Paul, for whom I voted in the primaries.

Unfortunately I live in California so it makes no difference.

From Obama’s speech in Toledo:

I won’t pretend this will be easy or come without cost. We’ll have to set priorities as never before, and stick to them. That means pursuing investments in areas such as energy, education and health care that bear directly on our economic future, while deferring other things we can afford to do without. It means scouring the federal budget, line-by-line, ending programs that we don’t need and making the ones we do work more efficiently and cost less.

I can’t wait to find out what these “other things we can afford to do without” are. Certainly not socialized health care, alternative energy, welfare disguised as tax cuts, or any of his other campaign promises.

He also mentioned (though not in the transcript) canvassing a neighborhood street on which there were already two foreclosures, and pointed out that this drives down the neighboring homes’ values. One might expect him to point out that this is decreasing the most valuable investment that these individuals have made. But instead he pointed out that decreased home values mean decreased tax revenue for local government services. It was such a telling moment. When he ad-libs and attempts to analyze the current situation, he defaults to his government-as-mommy socialistic view. All his pseudo-conservative talk of personal financial responsibility and increased individual savings, targeted at undecided my-fear-just-may-overwhelm-my-reason Ohioans, can’t cover up his deeply liberal welfare-state mentality.

Some hope that his past associations with far-left individuals and groups, along with his “most liberal senator” voting record (don’t worry, that was only 2007 - he was a very mainstream 16th and 10th most liberal in 2005 and 2006 [note the direction of this change]) are just that - the past. It’s always shocking to see the amount of promises and double-talk tolerated by starry eyed voters during a campaign year. I can’t wait till 2012 when President Obama is running for reelection and trying to explain, like Democratic congressmen after their utterly dismal performance in the majority, why exactly none of his promises have (yet) come true.

Personally, I’m pretty excited about having a magician as a president.

Hmm, but Jennifer Rubin seems to think perhaps we cannot fully take him at his word?

The surest clue to a politician’s intentions is his record, not his campaign rhetoric. Obama’s is fairly clear. Up through 2002 he sat on the Woods Fund and gave out money to a hodgepodge of left-leaning groups including ACORN and the Arab American Action Network. As a state senator he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act and favored strict gun control. As a U.S. Senator he was rated the most liberal (with some pretty liberal competition) — voting to cut off funding for troops and against both Justices Roberts and Alito and supporting the Democratic party line on everything from taxes to offshore drilling. He has been exquisitely sensitive to Big Labor’s agenda (e.g. opposing the Colombia Free Trade agreement, helping to sink immigration reform, and favoring the Orwellian-sounding Employee Free Choice Act).

Please try not to spoil the act, Jennifer! Even McCain is playing nice. As Krauthammer points out, McCain gambled too many times while Obama has sat back, played it safe, and let the clock continue to run out. All he has to do is be the “not from the same party as George Bush” candidate, and the Oval Office is his. McCain made a decision not to run as himself, and instead to run as “generic Republican” while Obama somehow duped the public and successfully positioned himself in the political center, the “uniter” with the leftist record.

Excuse me while I go dig a hole to hide in for the next four years.