First I want you to check out this awesome New Republic article by Libby Watson.

But before I do that I want to say some Research 101 sorts of things. It's really important to do research on people who ought to be doing better things with their lives. Sure, the mass public ought to be inspired by people who are doing good things for the world: the helpers, as Fred Rogers called them. But mostly you look for helpers in order to get help -- and once you've signed on, once you've become a helper yourself, you no longer need their publicity. It should also be noted that there are people out there who are doing opposition research on the helpers -- I'm referring, of course, to the secret teams, the FBI and CIA and NSA and other people of that sort. The sort of research the world needs more of is that of the folks who stand in the way of a better world, people whose misery is something they've been empowered to spread to others. We need to find these people, approach them compassionately, and ask: WTF? Barring that, we should at least allow them to live in homeless encampments in Oakland.

Libby Watson does an excellent job of the second type of research. Here she is going to tell us about the Partnership for America's Health Care Future.

One of the most loathsome and slimy of these firms’ creations is the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a coalition of health-industry groups—from big players in the insurance industry and the drug industry to those in the hospital industry and various local chambers of commerce—that was organized with the explicit intention of killing single-payer and the public option, which the Partnership lumps together as if they were remotely the same thing.

Of course, Watson tells us about where the trail of money leads -- who is funding whom, and who is sucking at whose pecuniary teat. I'd urge you all to read the article for that. The main reason I wrote this promo for her writing was to focus upon what Watson says these people do with their lives.

A productive day could mean anything from ghostwriting an op-ed for some local schmuck to send to their local paper, to astroturfing a Twitter account, to buying Facebook ads for their real-sounding-but-totally-fake organizations—whatever will convince their funders they’re doing something with their money and not just reading about the new Game of Thrones pop-up bar. And then they go home, sometimes via a bland happy hour full of other useless suits, to their very nice apartments—$2,500 a month for a one-bedroom without sufficient counter space to chop an onion, but it has a really nice common room with a ping-pong table—and reflect: What a good day’s work.

What I would want to tell them is this: come on, people, get lives. You all justify this exactly how? "Thousands of people are going to die because of the policies we promote, but, hey, rent's expensive, and all my buds are in DC." Is that what you all tell yourselves every night before you go to bed? This is no way to live your lives, much less get any sleep at night. Quit your jobs and spend your limited time on Earth -- between now and that not-so-far-off moment when a climate-change-induced hurricane puts DC underwater -- doing something more enjoyable. Use part of your $2500 to rent a place in Mexico, and spend the rest on good food and margaritas while enjoying better weather. And if you still need money you can move to a state where it's legal and work at marijuana dispensaries.

End of rant.