What Today's Headlines on Obamacare Should Be

It's a shame. This should be a day of excitement and hope. Today we implement a health care law that will cut the number of uninsured Americans by 25 to 30 million. A law that prevents denial of coverage for preexisting conditions. A law that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will reduce the federal deficit over time. A law tested in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts and full of provisions recommended by the conservative Heritage Foundation as recently as the early '90s. A law most of us should be able to get behind.

Sure, it's not perfect. So we implement it and work out the kinks as they are revealed in practice. We make it better. We don't shut down the government because a minority of lawmakers dislike it in principle. That's not how our democracy works.

Obamacare is about helping poor and middle class people get insurance. That's what it's for. That's what it does. The ideologues of the Right, who compare their childish escapades on Capitol Hill to the heroism of Flight 93 (I'm looking at you, John Culberson) need to stand down. You failed to convince Americans last year that Obamacare should be repealed, and lost the presidential election. It's time to move on. Fund the government, fix the postal service, pass a farm bill. Do some work.

A Few Words On Wawa

It's shocking, in a way, that I have maintained this blog for so long without commenting on Wawa. Wawa, for all my hypothetical readers out there, is a family-owned chain of convenience stores based near Philadelphia, with locations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia and Florida. I once, long ago, wrote about the "Hardee's-Roy Rogers Factor" in determining whether you were in the Northeast or the South; Wawa holds a similar regional connotation. For millions who grew up, or live, in Eastern Pennsylvania or South Jersey, when you see a Wawa, you're home.

"Wawa," by the way, is a Native American word for the Canada Goose. On Wawa Hoagie Day in Philadelphia, the goose can be seen ambling around Independence Mall, giving out free hoagies to thousands of happy people. Yeah, Wawa is like that.

Respect the goose: Wawa on Independence Mall

I am generally reluctant to get overly excited or partisan about brands, but with Wawa, my loyalty developed early. There's the no-fee ATMs. The good coffee. That it started out as a dairy, so you could trust the milk. Today, my kids crave the sandwiches and mac n' cheese, love the touch-screen ordering, and sing the Wawa Hoagiefest song in the car. All hail the next generation.

I was annoyed by a recent article in the New York Times comparing Pennsylvania's two dominant convenience stores, Sheetz and Wawa. Sheetz was set up as the rural, Pa. heartland market, and Wawa as the tony suburban sandwich shop. I don't know much about Sheetz, but Wawa is a very democratic scene, loved by people from all walks of life. Rather than illustrating the increasing cultural/economic divide, Wawa, I think, represents the kind of no-nonsense quality it's getting harder to find. (NPR commentator Marion Winik once complained of pizza in Texas: you have to choose between "the bad" and "the froufrou." Wawa is neither—this is what I'm talking about.)

So if you find yourself in the Mid-Atlantic, be sure to check out The Wa. You can thank me later for sharing the love.

Public Shaming on Twitter a Nightmare for all Parties

This is really horrible. Two guys at a tech conference are overheard privately making jokes about "dongles" and "forking," which were interpreted as sexist by a woman sitting in front of them whom they did not know. The woman then tweeted a picture of them with comments in order to publicly shame them.

Cue the, at turns, hyper-PC, hyper-insensitive and often nasty Internet, which within hours turned the story into a career and public-relations nightmare for the parties involved, their companies and the tech conference they were attending. What in years past would have resulted in a nasty look or, at worst, a testy conversation between the jokers and the offended party—most likely ending in apologies, a better understanding of each other and perhaps even friendship—has now resulted in the firing of one of the jokers and the offended tweeter herself.

The biggest problem with these sort of viral situations is that things quickly spin beyond the initial issue at hand. Was the tweeter right to publicly shame the men, rather than privately rebuke them? Were the tech guys being offensive or just a bit childish in their banter? What's the proper reaction for conference organizers and others on Twitter to this incident? Instead, we have hateful people tweeting horrible things about the woman. Her employer's website was hacked and shut down. The employer, running scared, fired her, around the same time the employer of one of the men fired him.

It's hard to say what can be done about such things in the wide-open world of social media. Restraint from all parties involved is called for, of course, but perhaps the key missing element here is courage. The offended tweeter could have brought the issue up with the men. The men could have apologized to her directly, or on Twitter, once they knew someone had taken offense (the one who was fired did apologize in a blog comment). The companies involved could have stood by their employees until the furor died down. Most of all, the cowardly Internet trolls and haters could have put up or shut up—they are the ones most deserving of shame.

Putting 'Liberty' Above Life—and the Pursuit of Happiness

If Government's the Disease, is Chaos the Cure?

So, Fernando Antonio Salguero, I hear a police dog detected explosive materials in the trunk of your illegally parked car, and you got arrested by police in New Jersey. The tear gas canisters they found you call "larger pepper-spray cans" (in case of attack by Yeti); the rocket-propelled flares are for distress (presumably on a boat in the open ocean), and the extendable baton, you claim, allows you to break windows to rescue people from burning cars.

"There's no problem [with having a baton] here in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but in the state of New Jersey the people are much closer to the slave state. Slaves are not allowed to be armed . . . at all," you told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

"I'm not anti-cop," you added. "I'm anti-tyranny."

You believe 9/11 was a fix and are a founder of the survivalist group Survive and Thrive. You refuse to fly. You are a self-styled defender the U.S. Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." You think juries should be able to nullify laws.

Like so many of your ilk, you claim to love some mythologized notion of America and have nothing but contempt for what the country actually is. You distrust government and the agents of government, believe in vast conspiracies upheld by armies of drone-like beaurocrats, and expect any day that the forces of evil will attempt to take away all your rights and liberties, enabled by our corrupt justice system.

If you dislike America so much, why don't you go live somewhere else? In Pakistan, you can own fully automatic weapons, live in a gated community, and hire armed guards to prevent your kids from being kidnapped on the way to the movie theater! Sounds good, right?

Of course, you won't leave, and here's why: the United States is a nation of laws, and the powers you rail against are the bastion of a functioning civil society, which you rely on every day of your life for health, security, well-being, safe delivery of goods and services, infrastructure to get to work, and your very job itself, the carrying out of which is predicated on notions of mutual trust, civic standards and voluntary access to private property.

You might appreciate the police a little more if we lived in your paradise of freedom, where government has little power to prevent vigilante justice (the voice of the people!), weapons hoarding and/or mini-fiefdoms created by self-styled "defenders of liberty." I'm not saying you personally are a bad person; I'm sure you mean well and believe you do what's best for your family. But think a bit more about the consequences of your ideology. You may find that is where Scary truly resides.

Damning Evidence of Charter Schools' Cherry Picking

I wrote last year on this blog about how, by building in a bias toward parents who have the means and desire to make their children's education a high priority, charter schools gut the public schools of their best students and make themselves look more effective than they actually are, as public schools are forced to handle those whom private educators refuse to admit, due to issues of behavior, disability or neglect.

More compelling evidence of this dynamic has just come out in a damning investigation by Reuters into charter schools' throwing up barriers in order to only get the students they want. As I mentioned last year, if we continue down this path of aggressive "school choice," we will only increase educational disparity in this country—the single biggest factor behind social and economic inequality. The charter school movement is not the path to quality schooling for all.

Read the Reuters report here.