HR 5808, introduced with 128 co-sponsors, would require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to begin offering affordable health benefits as a public option as part of health care exchanges beginning in 2014. Co-sponsors include, among others, California Representatives Anna Eshoo, George Miller, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters, and Henry Waxman, as well as Barney Frank of Massachusetts, and Alan Grayson of Florida.

The bill calls for offering at least three tiers of plans, “including a low-cost plan without compromising quality.”

The bill has been referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

It’s about time.

Read the full HR 5808. It’s short.

This is worse than a mistake. It’s hubris.

Even Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s 1818 horror classic regrets constructing his monster: “Would you also create for yourself and the world a demoniacal enemy? Peace. Peace. Learn my miseries and do not seek to increase your own.”

Think of a person that neither poops nor dies, does not need doctors or schools or diapers or houses, catches no H1N1 viruses, and does not wake these gowned officials up at night with teething or with adolescent woes: A person with a proper attitude toward money and authority. A person that’s all theory, no needy flesh, no messy bones.

Already a public relations firm, Murray Hill Incorporated, has announced its candidacy for Congress, according to the New York Times. On a campaign video, the company promises to bring “enlightened self-interest and corporate accounting to government.” The company says it will enter a primary election for a Maryland Congressional seat, according to its website. A statement on the website indicates the corporation plans to use “automated robo-calls, ‘Astroturf’ lobbying and computer-generated avatars to get out the vote.”

I imagine the move is tongue-in-cheek, but consider the possibilities: Maybe the Supreme Court will go further and grant corporations the ballot, perhaps limiting the rest of us to three-fifths of a vote apiece. Or perhaps do a 50-to-one reverse split and grant us even less.

All this makes me ponder: My dog Porschy is born in the U.S. She has rights, too. (She wants the right to bare teeth.) I am looking into incorporating her in Delaware. Votes for dogs!

P.S. See the Supreme Court’s decision.

Firefighters, you did great. California’s Lockheed Fire, which extended over more than 12 square miles,  is 100% contained.  It took the labor of thousands of you to battle back the blaze before it spread to homes, injured people, and destroyed farms. Although outbuildings and some seasonal cabins burned, nobody lost a home.

I was nearly in tears when I saw small trucks from tiny fire districts as far away as Ebbetts Pass and Murphys, which had come to join our local and state firefighters. I heard the big planes pass overhead bearing retardant to drop on the blaze. I watched the fire perimeters grow and stabilize on a private company’s fire viewer based on data from federal satellites operated by NASA and the Department of the Interior.

I was nearly in tears days later from the smoke drifting into our neighborhood. How much tougher it must have been for all of you who fought it yard by yard, road by road, tree by tree.

And nobody, as you doused nearly 8,000 burning acres at the Lockheed Fire, called you socialists. They called you heroes.

Yet you are the public option.

You did not ask any resident for a means test before dropping water or fire retardant, picking up a shovel, or lighting a backfire. Without you, our neighbors-and possibly ourselves next time-might be injured, homeless, deprived of a livelihood. We are grateful.

Now let’s think a little more about health care. We need a public option there, too. Guaranteeing health is also a big job. We know how to do it. And it’s about time.

As with many other instances during the George W. Bush administration in which legitimate duties of government (such as statesmanship) became conflated with and ultimately displaced by punishment, pure and simple, we are all of us coming to realize that Bush-era techniques employed in efforts to extract information from unwilling and even uninformed “informants” went way too far. Not only international conventions but also our own laws and morals were savagely violated by actions taken with a veneer of government approval.

As ever more reeking information continues to seep from the closed drawers of the military and spy agencies, it is clear that the heritage of America’s own dirty war will not go away on its own.

The problem now seems to be what to do about it. Should we go on talk shows and claim that torture wasn’t really torture? Should we-Nuremberg-style-prosecute and punish those who carried out illegal policies endorsed by our then-government? Should we convene a truth and reconciliation commission, so that those who carried out the torture can ‘fess up and hug their surviving former victims? Should we talk the issue onto its deathbed, bury it in paper, smother the legal and moral outrages in subtleties, and move on to health care, global warming and other pressing matters? Or should we see-to paraphrase the late folksinger, Phil Ochs– the pictures of the pain?

What to do? In this case, although I consider myself a progressive, I really would like to see Washington run more like a small business. I ask: “What would Main Street do?”

If I identified an embezzler in my business, I would likely institute controls to identify financial misdeeds earlier and more readily. I might choose not to prosecute the culprit due to concern about publicity. But would I keep the embezzler around to do next season’s taxes?

If I were a small town editor who discovered one of my writers was plagiarizing, I would probably increase my future scrutiny of news stories prior to publishing them. But would I continue to accept articles from the freelancer who burned me?

If I were a carpenter who discovered that a vender sold me wood for a house that was so weakened by wormholes that the house I was building could not stand, I might devise new methods for stress testing my materials before beginning construction. But would I buy again from that vender?

If I, a hapless householder, hire a plumber who recklessly breaks a pipe and lets a stream of sewage spew into my front yard, will I call the guy up again when the garbage disposal stops grinding?

I am not a carpenter or accountant. I do my own cleaning. My business does not earn enough to have employees, let alone ones who embezzle, and my garbage disposal is not broken, but you get the idea.

If I were a new president who discovered his employees had engaged in torture, I would likely devise new methods and policies to keep torture out of government. But would I continue to keep people who authorized it or did it on the payroll?

C’mon. Really? Would you? Would anybody? –buckdata

For her part, buckdata is wondering why money isn’t getting to the people most hard hit by this depression, such as those on the verge of losing their homes, those who have already lost them, and those for whom a tarp is not a government program but a literal roofing strategy in tent cities around the country.

To aid the President—on this issue at least– the following modest solution is hereby submitted:

Let’s all be bankers! Maybe it’s time for the poor and dispossessed and the rest of us to found some banks. Buckdata has a few in mind: First Foreclosure Bank in Stockton, Credit Default Swappers Bank in the New Orleans Ninth Ward, Toxic Assets Bank in Flint, Bonus Plus Bank with a nice Manhattan address, the Bank of Kaput in New Shock, Pennsylvania, and, of course, the online Bank of Buckdata.

Consider the possibilities: Laid off attorneys can volunteer time to help with the charters and incorporations. Laid off Wall Street employees can help us set up the books. Laid off web designers can devote their graphics talents to creating suitable online presence and branding. Impoverished retirees can exhume their mothballed suits and ties to lend us all gravitas at the headquarters front office.

Once the banks are set up, perhaps the homeless, the foreclosed, the evicted, and the about-to-be dispossessed will be able to approach Washington politely, hats (if we still have them) in hand, in search of generous bailouts. After all, a democracy, too, involves a contractual obligation, doesn’t it?

The proposal has a further benefit: If the sheriff’s deputies should arrive to evict us before the bucks start rolling in, we can always live in the vault. –buckdata

Note to readers: This is a satire. The above banks do not now exist. There is no Bank of Kaput in New Shock, Pennsylvania. There is no New Shock, Pennsylvania. No intention to single out particular existing institutions should be inferred from this blog post. This caution is necessary because of an unusual initiative reported in the New York Times on April 8. The article by Graham Bowley and Michael J. de la Merced details a scenario in which ordinary citizens may  be cajoled to invest in private mutual funds which are to be set up with government support to purchase other private institutions’ soured assets. The writers suggest such citizen investments may be envisioned as similar to the patriotic purchases of “Liberty Bonds” during the World War I. In such an audacious climate, formal disclaimers truly become necessary. Without such disclaimers, even well-informed readers may find themselves unable to distinguish pastiche from reality.

I decided to help out the Pope by proposing a few more sins to help the Church modernize. Here they are:

*Carbon Gluttony (CG): This sin involves using more carbon based materials–such as oil–than your planet or your national budget can afford. Employing this new concept, we will be able to characterize drivers of SUVs as sinners and breakers of the Revised Commandment, New Millenium, which states, of course: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil.”

*This brings us to the second sin: Absentee Warlordism (AW): Old fashioned warlords used rape, pillage, and private armies to hold onto territory after sovereign governments broke down; however, in a global era, this concept has been outsourced. The commandment should be: “Thou shalt not seize they neighbor’s oil using paid surrogates, puppet leaders, or your own country’s adolescents to conduct the battle, while you sit home.” Better yet, just say “no” to AW, and skip the W, as well.

*Closer to home is a proposed sin which is of particular concern to the buckdata blog: Buck-Passing. Banks and lenders, now that they have completed the task of blaming middle-class consumers and the houseless poor for obtaining home loans on the only terms possible to them, are currently engaged in passing the buck–or rather the lack of it–back onto the same hapless taxpayers by coaxing breaks and liquidity from the federal government. It’s a sin from the 1980s , dressed up in a new outfit, come back to haunt us again: The Sin against Accountability (SA).

*This brings us to proposed sin number four: False Attribution (FA), as in “My predecessor in office got us into this mess.” We will be hearing more of this sin, shortly. One of the correlated commandments could probably be: “Thou shalt not continue thy predecessor’s unjust war.” You can probably think of a few more.

These are just a few of the hot new sins that could be added to the Vatican’s playlist to give the church a whole new sound. I leave it to others to ponder the matter of revising penances. Hey, isn’t it about time?