Can you see me?

I’m a news junkie, particularly political news. But more and more over the past 30 years, I’ve found it difficult to get information about what happens in the halls of government, which actually affects me. Thank God for the Internet. With the birth of the bloggers, I’ve found some individuals actually reading legislation and monitoring the actions of our government officials. Try to find that on network or cable news!

So after the last presidential press conference on health care, what was the lead story on NBC’s Today Show? The president’s final aside to a question about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr.

And when they finally got to health care, they asked the same old questions about how government is going to pay for it. “He didn’t provide specifics.” As if they’d report them anyway -- their 15-second attention spans couldn’t handle the details. The president answered that question as well as can be managed without a solid bill to address, and they either didn’t understand it or chose to ignore it. They also trotted out the old canard about the deficit after ignoring it during the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, two wars and the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill.

Then they played the “What’s the rush?” line with the help of GOP lightweight Eric Cantor.

What’s the rush? People are suffering and dying out here.

The president, who spent months on the ground across the country talking to actual people during the presidential campaign, knows this. He reminds himself every day via his purple file.

Do our congressional representatives? How long has it been since your rep has visited your area? Do they acknowledge all the voters who are living with a medical crisis – with and without insurance? I can say my Republican Senator Grassley was in Iowa recently, but his answer to a constituent who asked why he can’t have access to the same health insurance as the senator was: “You can. Get a job with the federal government.”

And the corporate media allows them to get away with this by looking the other way. Instead, what do I get from them? At 7:30 a.m. (Central Time) each day on the Today Show, I can count on the latest update to the Michael Jackson circus. Enough already. That doesn’t affect me.

But health care does. So we all need to be calling, e-mailing and writing our representatives and the media talking heads and asking, “Can you see me?” ‘Cause I can see you, and I’m taking names.