Let it snow.

No surprises from DC this weekend but the blizzard of white as it fell on our Senators, racing to the bottom of a national health care debate so perverted with corporate interests that the deep white stuff couldn't even cover-up the smell.

60 promised votes later, Sen. Harry Reid emerged "victoriously" with a health reform bill sans public option, sans public Medicare buy-in and touting an anti-abortion attack to rival that of the Hyde Amendment in 1976, only this time aimed at curtailing insured women's right to pay for their own abortions with their shiny new private insurance plans.

How do we stay hopeful amidst this sham? Why should we support this crap? To answer these questions we must first acknowledge how we got here. And then we must support this disgusting legislation as a necessary step towards building a better, deeper movement for real health care reform that includes all of us, and all that we need. Including abortion. For all women. For better or for worse, legislation is how we as a society have chosen to determine and partition health care.

So let's start not by killing this unperfect bill, and not by pretending it's great. But by accepting it - including it's successes - as our reality, and move on from there.

We have much to learn about each other: our needs, how health systems fail us/serve us, and how they don't. It's easier to do this when more of us are in the same boat, and this bill brings 31 million new faces onto the corporate yacht marred with leaky portholes, cracks in the hull and crappy food.

Though it's not this way for the ship Captains, mind you. But we can't overthrow them if we're not also all on the boat.

Ahoy, Maties! We're all we've got.
Terry