Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the self-important stylings Blue Dog Mike Ross of Arkansas, and what he’s helped to do to the current health care debate:

MIKE ROSS: …You know, we have been trying to get healthcare reform done since Harry Truman, and our objective is to get healthcare reform done this year; that was the President’s original objective. And somewhere along the way, people started imposing this artificial deadline of get it done by August 1. We’ve done a lot this year. The American people are ready for us to slow down and to actually take the time to think about what we are voting on, to read what we are voting on, and by waiting until September, this gives every member of Congress, Democrat and Republican, the opportunity to go home and listen to their constituents, to make sure that we’re getting this right.

The American people are ready for you to slow down, cut the knees out from under the public option and water down the health care reform bill? Really?!?

Let’s take a look at a lot of America’s reality:

The grassy parking lot is full. Beyond the fence, the cars are stacked up for miles. A snake of headlights is visible in the semi-dark along the curvy length of Hurricane Road, waiting to access the Wise County Fairgrounds.

These are the modern-day breadlines: people desperate not for food, but for health care.

“We are working taxpaying jobs, paying taxes, and we can’t get insurance because we make $6.55 an hour,” said Laura Head, 32, of Rogersville, Tenn., the first person in line Friday for the first day of the Remote Area Medical clinic, an annual three-day event offering free medical care. “This is really a great beneficial thing, but it doesn’t have to be this way; we could all have insurance.”

A single mother of three who mows yards and moves trailers for a living, Head said she arrived at the fairgrounds Tuesday, to camp out at the fairgrounds until the health fair began Friday morning. Her motivation was simple: severe, constant pain.

Close to two years ago, her boyfriend smashed her teeth, she said – but, without the $6,000 needed to have the teeth pulled she has endured infection after infection, making literally 100 visits to the emergency room for antibiotics and pain medication.

At $6.55 an hour, Laura Head can’t afford to buy a lobbyist to stroll the halls of Congress, ply the media with tasty morsels and hang out in Max Baucus’s offices, now can she?

If Mike Ross and the Blue Dogs want to use the August recess to hear from constituents, what say we give them — all of them — an earful?

One of the eternal truths of today’s journalism is that its awfully easy to get oppo handed to you and run with it.   

But the real difficulty — and value — is in taking that oppo, reading it critically, and finding the things which a skeptical person might want to question.  Conveniently omitted facts, long-standing ties to lobbying or other client interests involved, or donor conflict of interest questions when it comes from an elected official. 

The I.F. Stone maxim of "all governments lie" can be amended in this context to "all political operatives have an agenda, for which they are paid handsomely by monied interests who get something out of it."

Let’s take the following example from a NYTimes article yesterday:

The web site TaxDayTeaParty.com listed its sponsors, which ranged from FreedomWorks, founded by former House Majority Leader, Dick Armey (R-Texas), Top Conservatives on Twitter, to RNC Radio.com, to the book from Senator Jim Demint of South Carolina, “Saving Freedom,” giving his “firsthand account of the unsettling socialist shift.”

Note that the reporter has done some investigation on the root sponsorship of the TaxDayTeaParty,com website, including the involvement of FreedomWorks and Dick Armey. So there was some digging on some level there.

But then, within a couple of paragraphs, there is this:

“Our main goal as far as a national organization — although that’s a tough term to use since we wish we were organized better than we were — is just to facilitate an environment where a new movement would be born,” Eric Odom, the administrator of TaxDayTeaParty.com, said in a brief interview on Wednesday morning. “We’re confident that we’ll see taxpayer coalitions at the local level starting tomorrow.”

Mr. Odom sounds like a contractor who was just hired to webmaster the site, doesn’t he? And perhaps someone who has had a bit of media training so that his responses come out succinct and with talking points firmly rooted. 

But is that all he is? Hell no — just read through Jane’s Tea Party timeline and see how many places he crops up:

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Looks like some questions are being raised about Mark Gitenstein’s lobbying ties and the potential conflict of interest it might present in helping select federal judges at the Office of Legal Policy:

The likely nominee to head Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, Mark Gitenstein, worked as a lobbyist for the chamber between 2000 and 2008, helping his firm earn more than $6 million in fees, according to federal lobbying records. The business alliance has pushed the White House and Congress to appoint judges and enact legislation that would make it harder for plaintiffs to sue large corporations and collect large damage awards, raising concerns from some activists.

Gitenstein, a partner at the Mayer Brown law firm in Washington, was a longtime senior aide to Vice President Joe Biden. In recent years, he also has served as counsel to the chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, which pushed for changes in federal litigation rules and adding business-friendly judges to state courts.

But that’s not the interesting part. It starts getting amusing when the defense mechanisms kick into gear:

If nominated, Gitenstein would require a waiver from the ethics rules. The White House has already acknowledged the need to exempt several high profile positions, including that of William Lynn III, recently a lobbyist for defense contractor Ratheon Corp., who was named to the No. 2 job at the Pentagon….

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