Just sick about health care

I originally posted this in a comment to someone else's LJ, but it deserves its own post. Health care reform (or health insurance reform, as the Democrats have cleverly started repositioning it) has been at the absolute top of my political priority list for years, but there was no politician willing to take it on. I was so relieved when Obama stepped forward. Watching his efforts be derailed by cynical lies is just horrifying. Everything he says is so sensible, but too many people aren't even listening, they're just acting like mindless dittoheads. And nobody, even Obama, is willing to identify the elephant in the room: the 30% of our health care dollar that is simply burned by the insurance industry.

I know I should do something, but I can hardly bear to even read about it anymore. I haven't been posting about it in my LJ because I'm pretty sure I'd just be preaching to the choir.

Should I be trying to attend those horrible Town Meetings to balance out the orchestrated protests? Writing my own congressional representatives and senators seems like the place to start: is an email enough or do they still pay more attention to snail mail? Is there any point writing senators and congressmen from other regions who may have more power in the process? Does anybody have any suggestions on the best place to start?

Burn After Reading - short review

The Coen brothers seem to have pretty much stopped making movies and are just goofing around with their friends in front of a lot of very expensive cameras. I actually watched the special features, and it explained a lot. As The Brothers tell it, they just sat around making up funny characters for various of their actor friends, dreamed up a series of unconnected scenes featuring various combinations of these characters, and then made up a goofy story that would tie them all together. About 2/3 of the way through the movie they got bored with goofy and start killing people off in sudden, unexpected bursts of violence (not a spoiler if you have ever seen any of their other movies. And if you haven't you should start with one that is better than this one.). In other words, it has its moments of hilarity but as a movie it's not very good.

thorintatge, feel free to send it back as soon as you've watched it.

BTW, has anybody else noticed how much Joel Coen is starting to resemble Bob Dylan as he looked about 20 years ago?