C-SPAN: Where Health Care (and Everything Else) Gets Debated Daily

C-SPAN. The word itself is simultaneously dull and foreboding, like a medical acronym you don't quite understand. Can't shake that dull ache in your chest? Probably just heartburn. But don't worry, we'll run a C-SPAN... just to be sure.

But the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network is in fact one of the great tools at the American public's disposal, and it's a shame so few of us (me included) ever take advantage. Its three TV channels live broadcast every moment of action on the floor of the House and Senate, and provide unedited, pundit-free coverage of major political events present and past. In other words, they pour sunlight on the shadowy machinery of representative democracy. (As do these guys at the Sunlight Foundation — though I should note for disclosure's sake that I'm good friends with one of their consultants.)

Charitably, you could say that C-SPAN's work exposes the truth behind checks, balances, and bipartisanship, which is that checks, balances, and bipartisanship are not ethical ideals, but processes as predatory and amoral as those that animate the Wall Street trading floor. (It is always good to puncture myths about your government's innate virtue.) Uncharitably, you could say that it exposes the gross reality of American politics, which is that it rewards hypocrisy and extremism.

Anyway, today C-SPAN is covering the Health Care Summit, giving the country the opportunity to see how health-care reform actually works (or doesn't work), as opposed to showing you what health-care "expert" X, Y, and Z are paid to tell you about it. And that itself is a gift worth endorsing.

Tim Pawlenty on the Health Care Debate andBill Clinton on the Debate