A Confession.

I am baffled by the healthcare thing. The debate fired up while I was on my mostly-disconnected-from-the-news road trip, and now I feel like I'm squarely in my recurring school nightmare, the one where I realize it's finals week and I've forgotten to go to class for the past twelve weeks. Single-payer? Public option? Jon Kyl? It's all a mystery to me beyond annually rising premiums and Cigna resolutely refusing to put the only migraine med that works into its $10 co-pay tier.

The Daily Star ran a five-way discussion on its Sunday backwards op-ed page this morning, featuring Kyl and John McCain along with our intrepid southern Arizona representatives, Gabrielle Giffords and Raul Grijalva. One cup of coffee was not enough to jolt my brain into reading comprehension mode, much less analytical mode, so I'll have to go back to those and possibly take notes since there is probably very little chance that Rachel might show up on my doorstep today to explain the whole deal in soothing tones while handing me Otter Pops and dabbing my forehead with a cool cloth.

One sphere where we can all be fairly confident is the singular level of incoherent insanity Michelle Bachmann (R-Crazypants, MN) will exhibit on any given day. In her latest eruption, Rep. Bachmann has been arguing against affordable healthcare for everyone because it will force people like her to wait in longer lines. You know, after they let all the riffraff into actual doctors' offices instead of shunting them off to George W. Bush's lauded great American populist healthcare option, the emergency room. Michelle Bachmann understands doctor's offices because she has five kids of her own and claims to have 23 foster children as well. No word on the inconvenience historically posed to the suckers who took an extra ten seconds getting out of the house and thus ended up in line behind the Bachmann brood every. damn. time.

I'm off to study now.