Well, that's not precisely true: we have two answers. Two out of 31.
I just made the mistake of accidentally clicking on the link in my own sig line, which reads
Help edit this DKosopedia page on Health Care Reform!
I started the DKosopedia page on H.R. 3200 after attending Rep. Gary Miller's town hall on health care, where he said that the material presented there is what they're e-mailing around. I have had people tell me that they have received e-mails with these contents.
If you hang around here much, you've probably seen it. It's not like I'm shy about commenting.
We should have answers to it all by now -- but so far, we don't. We have only answered two claims made by the GOP. Just two.
I started to get ready to edit it -- and then I thought better of it. Giving people political material laid out nicely on a plate lets them remain observers. Let's see, I thought, what people can come up with.
I have said here for years that we should see ourselves as political actors rather than merely as political observers, and that means that sometimes you need people to get off their duffs and start doing something beyond complaining. Making a call, signing online petitions, these are a good start, but they're pretty easy. Writing a letter to the editor, visiting a legislator, doing research -- that's harder. That's even more worthwhile.
Now, I know that people who read and comment here hate being hectored. If I didn't know it before trying to organize phone-banking in LA-04 last year -- a race that the netroots could have helped to win, as we did with Scott Murphy in NY-20 -- I certainly learned it soon enough. Sitting around feeling that one has acquitted oneself morally just by expressing opinions is alluring. Digging around and working cooperatively to express ideas in the most effective way possible is hard. It's uncomfortable. It's not what many people here came here to do. And before you think that I'm claiming not to be guilty of this myself -- I am totally guilty of it myself. Recognizing that guilt is why I push myself towards action diaries, because without them I could live entirely in my head.
So, I'm ready to change my sig line. Experiments and initiatives fail all the time; I don't take it personally. (If I should take this personally, that makes me less likely to do so. Freud called this repression. I call it "getting through the day.") But before I do so, before I replace the text of the DKosopedia page with a list of products made by Hello Kitty or whatever I do, I just want to invite people one last time to go there and see if we can contribute collectively to creating a fact sheet we can be proud of. I want to see if our volunteer efforts can help weigh against that $700,000 per day that mcjoan reported today is being spent by insurers to kill health care reform.
If you haven't felt the need for a fact sheet rebutting the likes of the memo that appears on that DKos page, then God bless you. You live a happier political life than I do. But if you'd like to see something like this created, created, then come take some time over the next 24 hours and create it. Two submissions have been made; once I see ten up there, I will plan to write the eleventh.
We do, I believe, have answers to GOP attacks on the public option. We just have to be willing to do the work of collecting and refining the information, writing them down, and sending them out. If we don't make an affirmative effort to do it, it won't happen. You already know the stakes.
Update! Commenters here have offered text for answering points 4, 5, and 8 so far; I'll gladly port in any edits people don't want to make themselves. Thanks for your help, everyone! It's very gratifying to see.