The speech

Word is, Obama will come out in full favor of a public option. I've been willing to let the public option go as long as a health care reform bill ensures near universal coverage, no lifetime caps, or refusals due to pre-existing conditions (being alive, after all, is a pre-existing condition). But I think Krugman's right, if coverage is to be mandated, this can't be made to look like the Let's Make the Insurance Industry Even More Profitable Act of 2009.

But the speech I wanted to mention wasn't the one the president is making tonight, but rather the one he gave yesterday. More specifically, the media's coverage of it in the aftermath of a week's worth of Outrage TV from people who "disagree with Obama." But I'll let Doghouse do the blogging:

Anyway, a deep bow and a hearty secret teenaged reprobate handshake for the "about 100" students of Pendleton (IN) Heights High School who walked out of class yesterday to protest the school's refusal to let them watch the President's speech. For which, of course, they were all given Detention, the Lethal Injection of tiny minds, just so they all understood that artificial, uninformed, politically-motivated, television-buffoon-driven protests, real, imagined, or fabricated, would be given a full and friendly hearing by the school's administration, but that its students could just Shut Th' Fuck Up.

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And I like to think I at least consider how my own opinions color what I hear on the idiot box, but this is one of those times when it's damn near impossible to see any justification. The locals ran this stuff for a week. They never had any problem finding some "spokesman" for "concerned" "parents" to fill the time. But somehow I had to turn to the internets to learn that Reagan had delivered an overt stump speech with children as a backdrop. (Not that he ever really did anything else.) The entire issue was framed by the loudest screamers among the bunch who resoundingly lost the last election to this guy, including, they kept telling me at the time, Red State Indiana for the first time in 45 years. Controversy! And having helped see to it that urban legend and political underhandedness would rule the day in the Doughnut counties, the locals were reduced to finding a Marion county school to serve as an example of the Parents May Opt Their Children Out alternative, noting that at Pike Township's New Augusta Academy about 30 students out of 800-plus were excused. Thirty. It suggests that every last fucking one of their parents had been interviewed by local news in the preceding five days.