Just trying to help

Really, we are.

You've no doubt seen it, but Tina Fey is still bringing the awesome.

An unaffiliated, previously undecided co-worker of mine recently decided to vote for Obama. It wasn't particularly that he loved Obama, and it certainly wasn't anything I said. The reason? He found out about McCain's health care plan. The sheer awfulness of the McCain plan really deserves a lot more attention, and I think it's going to get it. There are a lot of problems with our system of employment-based health insurance, but the only thing about it that does work is that most people who have insurance, have it because of their jobs. Instead of targeting one of the many areas where health care policy fails Americans, he takes aim squarely at where it succeeds: insuring working people. To that end, I think this brochure put out by the Obama campaign is helpful at illustrating exactly what "the worst excesses of state-based regulation" really are.

Coinciding with the Obama campaign's decisions to focus on the economy and health care, McCain has publicly declared that he's going to start talking about Rev. Wright, Tony Rezko, and the Weather Underground. Says he wants to "turn the page." Back some forty-five years, evidently. The fact that there's nothing there, and there's never been anything there, and several 1,200 word articles have been run that do little but conclude that there isn't any there there, isn't going to slow him down. I appreciate the fact that he's running out of options at this point. If Sarah Palin was a Hail Mary, I don't know what this is -- tossing a midget over the defensive line? But I think the only appropriate response to a man trying to change the subject to crazy '60s radicals with no particular relationship to Obama can be nothing but: Why are you trying so hard to change the subject? I mean, if Obama were campaigning on this strategy we'd be looking at Sarah Palin's witchdoctor practicing the laying of hands and her husband joining a political party that advocates secession from the United States, no? It's some wacky stuff, no doubt, but it doesn't get anyone's bills paid. A little more context, and a more informed football metaphor, here.