Jay: it wasn't just one Republican. Also: as I understand it, the sole basis for Republican claims about illegal immigrants is not that they will be able to get free or subsidized health care, except at emergency rooms (there are explicit provisions banning that), but that they will be able to sign up for health insurance and pay premiums, like anyone else. As they can presently do here, in their native countries, or wherever.

publius: "But it seems like a short-term news cycle win in exchange for longer-term shift. A focus on the substance seems like it would lay groundwork for a more permanent shift." I disagree. I think it's very important, especially combined with the other bits of Republican disrespect. -- I assume that most people don't pay a lot of attention to politics. The fine details of the construction of the health care exchange will be lost on them. They will not click over to the actual bill and figure out what, exactly, it means that the government might pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling, etc. Moreover, and unfortunately, they're inclined to think that when two sides are fighting, the truth probably lies somewhere in between -- which is a good operating assumption when both sides are arguing in good faith, but not otherwise. On the other hand, people do, over time, tend to reveal their basic nature. (One of the scary things about blogging.) Often this doesn't matter when politicians do it, since voters are often not paying attention; but it happens. And when one side reveals its basic nature on an occasion when a lot of people are watching, and it goes viral, that's a big deal. That, I think, is what happened last night. I do not think most people will be in doubt about which side acted like children last night. And that's a very big deal.

I didn't mean for this to become sort of like a wake; I just got kind of emotional last night. Now I'm off for the airport. Buh-buh-bye! *more giggles* *and more thanks*

*giggles* (I'm an atheist. I was Christian from the ages of 13-22, then agnostic, and then while working on my book, I realized that while I thought there was a conception of moral responsibility that worked fine for our earthly purposes, I couldn't see how to justify one that was strong enough to justify eternal damnation or beatitude. Since Christianity is the version of religion I'm drawn to, that seemed to scotch the idea of a just God -- absent a belief in universal salvation, which I've never figured out how to believe in.)

PS: I hate packing.

linkmeister: never. ;) OCSteve: It was never, ever hard to be nice to you. Just to embarrass you back: there was one point, maybe two or three years ago, when you wrote something that made me think to myself: right. That does it. OCSteve must be a practical joke played on me by God, since there's absolutely no way, in the normal course of things, that someone would so completely incarnate everything I ever hoped for in response to something I wrote. It wasn't one of the times when I convinced you of something (that was never the main point); it was just the fact that there you were, a person I would probably never have gotten to know outside of blogs, and who disagreed with me on a lot of things in ways that might have prevented us from communicating, and yet there we were, really seeing where the other was coming from. That was always what I was hoping for, and that time, it really was as though God, the only being capable of seeing it so exactly, had made you up to tweak me. Except that I don't believe in God. (And I didn't really believe this, either.) I also always admired your guts and your good faith. It meant a lot. And you were always worthy, at least if I'm any judge. Jeff: eek. But thanks. ;) And thanks to Publius, and Gary, and everyone.

Thanks. Thanks so much. (I'll still be around through tonight, though, while I finish packing.) And of course I'll comment. How could I possibly not?

I second publius on civility. That said: I think that this might or might not lead to higher deficits, depending both on what cost-control mechanisms end up in the final bill and what measures we adopt to pay for it. Given any kind of decent cost-control (which I don't think is at all inevitable), we should be able to drive down the cost that people pay for health care, where this includes taxes spent to pay for government programs, insurance premiums, and out of pocket costs. That's my benchmark. On the other hand, I also think that the Republicans, and the centrist Democrats, are being disingenuous here. A lot of cost-control measures will involve some degree of government influence on the health care system. This doesn't have to be heavy-handed: it could involve, for instance, a public plan adopting the results of comparative effectiveness research, which would provide a market incentive for others to do likewise (assuming that this did, in fact, hold down costs without making consumers unhappy; if not, no advantage for doing it.) It could involve incentives (not coercive measures) to adopt electronic records, and/or to make these records as compatible across plans as possible. Etc., etc. The problem is, every single one of these measures is being portrayed as a Horrid Expansion Of The Federal Government, allowing bureaucrats to come between you and your doctor -- regardless of whether this has even the slightest basis in reality. (See comparative effectiveness research.) If someone demagogues every single cost-control measure, it's hard to turn around and decry their absence in good faith.

House. Not Hopuse. Sigh ...

AL: I haven't had people confused about my gender recently in person, though people always used to assume I was a guy on blogs. However ... Once upon a time, I was working for Let's Go, and I was in Mexico. (NW Mexico, which I am told is worse than most of the rest.) I got a *lot* of harassment, and there was very little I could do about it, since part of writing a travel guide is that you have to go to e.g. restaurants, night clubs, etc. And in my case, it was of course alone, since there wasn't anyone else. I had been in other countries with serious harassment, e.g. Egypt, but somehow it was uglier this time: in Egypt, a lot of the guys would (after I turned them down and they realized I meant it) have this "heck, can't blame a guy for trying" attitude, whereas for whatever reason, that summer in Mexico, it was more "screw you." One fine day, a guy grabbed my breasts, and when I got away, started screaming "F*cking bitch! F*cking American whore!", and I thought: really, I have had enough of this. My first thought was to get a nun's habit, but I didn't know where to get one, and besides, it was July, in Mexico. My second thought was to cut off all my hair, which I did. (As in, it was less than 1/4" long.) And it worked! As I had hoped, in the split second during which someone walked by me, he was generally too busy asking himself "what on earth is that?" to bother me. Yay! But a couple of times, people really did mistake me for a guy. (I am not very guylike. I was in T-shirts.) The first time it happened, I was writing in a restaurant, and this guy struck up a conversation with me, and it was normal, a kind of normal conversation I hadn't had for weeks -- movies, soccer, etc. I was so happy -- not having any normal conversations for weeks is pretty lousy -- and then, maybe half an hour into this, a friend of his walked up, and he introduced me as "un norteamericano", and my inward jaw hit the floor. Completely surreal.

Mythago: obviously, I feel more for his wife and kids. Especially the kids: this would be tough enough even if you weren't ten or twelve. Agreed about Olbermann. -- I mean, who among us has not tried to put down how we feel in words that are worthy of it? And who among us has not, in the cool light of day, thought: oh dear God, I wrote that?? (Even remembering why you wrote it, and liking the original impulse better than cool stingy craftsmanship or whatever the alternative is: still.)

I just made the textless other version of this vanish. .....

Well, yeah, but it was hard to watch it without feeling some compassion for the guy, as well as some relief that he didn't do the usual squirmy thing.

Gary: I didn't delete 2:44. It was a later one, best forgotten.

I have deleted a comment that purported to be from joe from lowell, but that was from an IP address joe had never used before, and was, um, offensive beyond belief.

Ack -- I hadn't seen the 2:44 comment when I responded to cofax. (Which is odd.) Banned now.

cofax: nothing to report. Others: I never, ever write on everything I want to write on. I have a job. In the specific cases of DADT and the awful brief -- well, with DADT I got to it late because of other stuff, and couldn't think of anything to say other than: screw you, Barack Obama, which didn't seem like enough for a post. In the case of the brief, I started reading it, got caught up in trying to figure out one of the legal issues it raised halfway through, and before I knew it, a couple of days had gone by and other stuff had come up. This always happens to me. Possibly it would be different if this were my full-time job, but it isn't. I also think I've become more reluctant to just post things with minimal commentary, for reasons I'm not at all sure of. In any case: I don't ever infer from anything anyone doesn't discuss that it's something she doesn't care about. But it's specifically false of me.

About sexual orientation: I seem to have overstated things, at least if this is at all right. Reading it does make one see the difficulties of trying to come up with anything like statistics about a group many of whose members are closeted, and where things like "what you think being a woman/man involves" play a huge role. That said, the link doesn't support the idea that most transpeople are attracted to people of their biological gender. Jes: that sounds right. How awful.

Seb: that is odd. For one thing, it has always seemed to me that while there are *lots* of exceptions, guys are a lot more likely to get all nervous about the possibility of being thought to be in any way female than women are about the possibility of being thought to be in any way male. So I would have thought that being MTF would be harder, at least harder to admit to oneself and then to accept, at least assuming that the operative factor is being brought up as a guy. On the other hand, transmen seem often to feel invisible compared to transwomen, so that might factor in. But it's odd nonetheless.

"I've met every single one of them." -- *giggles* My base of personal experience is one (1) transwoman who was attracted to women. However, I did check this question out. Like all stats about transmen and transwomen, it's not wholly reliable, since there are obvious problems with locating a representative sample of transpeople, including the deeply closeted ones. However, fwiw, this seemed to be the consensus.

Cynthia: I don't think it "compensates"; I was just aware that I couldn't possibly write about this without mentioning Obama's huge failings on other LGBT issues. Fwiw, my understanding is that this is not true: "most transsexuals are "straight" in the sense that they are attracted to people of the gender opposite to what they perceive their own gender to be." As I understand it, the proportion of biological males and females who are attracted to members of the same biological gender is roughly the same among transsexuals as among cissexuals, which means that the majority of transpeople are attracted to members of the gender they identify with. (Or, to put this more briefly: transwomen are as likely to be attracted to women as cissexual men are; transmen are as likely to be attracted to men as women are.)

Cynthia: I have no idea why Obama is doing what he's doing. Also, I don't know how what Obama is doing will advance the cause of cissexual gay men and women, any more than I know how it will advance the cause of Tibetan freedom. It's a separate issue. And if I announced that I planned to regard any step taken to advance the interests of gay men and women solely in terms of its implications for Tibetan freedom, I think it would be clear what was wrong with that. Same here. Transmen and transwomen have their own interests, and those need protecting, whether or not doing so advances the cause of anyone else. Being gay used to be classified as a mental illness. Now, it's not regarded as one, thank God. Being trans is still regarded as a mental illness, but that's as controversial as the inclusion of homosexuality used to be. No one seems to know what accounts for either homosexuality or being trans, though it doesn't seem at all accurate to describe either as a choice (though I'm sure there are people somewhere who do choose both, since human nature is endlessly variable.) You say you are a gay woman: I'm sure that you can therefore imagine what it would be like to be forced into a heterosexual marriage. I suspect that even if you liked the guy, it would still be awful and false to have to act, all the time, as though you were something you are not. (Cf. Brokeback Mountain.) And I imagine that if people asked you why it was so awful, why you couldn't just be married like everyone else, and enjoy it, you'd think: you don't get it at all. For reasons I did not choose, this feels just endlessly wrong to me; for reasons you did not choose, you do not share that; if I have to marry a man, I will be condemned to a constant lie. Being trans is like that, only much more so, since it's not your marriage that feels all wrong; it's your entire body. And while you can find ways of getting away from your marriage for a bit, it's not nearly as easy to get away from your body. No nice little sojourns away from it all where you can just be a man (or a woman, depending), and have no one care. If finding yourself attracted to people of your own gender does not count as a mental illness, as it shouldn't, why is finding that you identify with a gender other than the one you were born with, for reasons that are similarly not of your own choosing, count as a mental illness? In neither case is there any evidence of further mental problems: disorganized thinking, hallucinations, etc. (Except that transmen and transwomen have some of the problems following from their stigmatization and from being closeted that gay men and lesbians used to have: e.g., more depression.) So: why treat this differently? And why, if you don't, should you regard gender reassignment as "mutilation", rather than as a way of bringing oneself and one's body into harmony? And if you have not yourself felt what it's like to believe that your whole biological gender is just wrong, why not try to imagine what it would be like for someone who does? I suspect that if you did, you might not begrudge them their relatively few protections and victories.

d'd'd: Though I wish it were different, I think that this prevents employment discrimination for federal employees, rather than guaranteeing payment for gender reassignment. Cynthia Marx: as jdkbrown said, gay men and women creep people out too. Yet I don't think this is a good reason to say, for instance: well, if they want to (sic) be gay, OK, but why should I put up with them bringing their partners to work-related parties, or have to see them kiss one another when their partners come to pick them up from work, or look at photos of their spouses? Ewww! If transmen and transwomen creep you out, I suggest getting to know some, and asking them what it's like for them. They're not freaks, and they're not drag queens either.

I think this point by magistra is crucial: "If you want to be cheered as liberators, you need to get the hell out of there once you've done the liberating." Either that or, as I've said before, there needs to be a reason why your occupation is viewed as legitimate, even if very unwelcome. Losing a war of aggression is like this. So, I think, are ongoing humanitarian abuses that are utterly and totally beyond the pale, so much so that it really isn't that unrealistic to imagine that people will come to their senses and recoil from what they've done. Here, I'm thinking of Rwanda: normally, people do not just up and repent of their brutality, or even go quiet because they recognize that someone trying to stop it is doing something legitimate, but in very, very extreme cases, like Rwanda, it does not seem to me to be nuts to suppose that they might. In neither case are you trying to impose democracy, so I think that, in principle, the cases in which you can pull off a military occupation without massive public discontent just do not include any cases of trying to establish a democracy. But neither do cases in which you only stay a very short time. Staying for a very short time requires either the existence of a government that can be restored or somehow put in place very quickly (e.g., the Kuwaiti government after the first Gulf War), or utter and total irresponsibility. There will generally be no such government in waiting when you're trying to impose a democracy (there might be a party with a leader, or even a cabinet in exile, but not a whole government, ready to roll.)

Also: while I was logged in as Moe, I went through the spam. You have no idea how many messages the troll from a bit ago posted, using pseuds that were not his/her own.