"This is just the beginning," Reid said. "The opponents of this bill have used every trick in the book to delay this day." (It was, by then, 7:03 a.m., and the vote was already itself just a bit delayed.) "It is regrettable that they choose to view our citizen's healthcare through a political lens," he said.

Then at 7:05 the roll was called. Senator Byrd coughed up that his "aye" vote was for Teddy Kennedy. Also, one was unable to tell from C-Span 2 exactly why the Senate cracked up for like 30 seconds when Reid voted, and no one was awake on the Internet to explain.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was, quite obviously, passed. You may go read it now, if you like.

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I would rather not keep calling. That was my third or fourth or fifth inquiry about the swine-flu vaccine, by phone or in person at the office while getting other shots for the kid. This is not because I am a hysterical parent, unable to bear the thought of my child going without medical intervention. I do not snap awake at three in the morning with flu panic, worrying that some filthy stranger may cough around my precious offspring before he has been properly immunized, cursing the government for not coming up with vaccine fast enough, scheming to intercept the life-saving product before it goes to someone else's child. (Let the other child die.)

Instead, I keep forgetting about the whole thing. Then, after a couple of days, I remember, and I make myself call the pediatrician's office, and the pediatrician's office puts me on hold. And when I get off hold, they say they don't have it. Or one time they did have a batch, but they were only giving it out to kids between 3 and 5, or to kids who had heart conditions requiring surgery. The kid is only 2, and as far as we know his heart is fine. Keep calling back.

It would be much less work if I really were crazy. I try to be reasonable about health care for the kid: get him the normal shots, give him medicine when the doctor says to, and don't go looking for other stuff to get worried about. Now, though, through the wonders of the United States public-health system, the sensible thing turns out to be impractical. I really should get him a swine-flu shot; I really can't get him a swine-flu shot.

Either I force myself to act like an obsessed person or I ignore the whole swine-flu threat. I would love to ignore it. My inclination is to ignore it. At least I think that's my inclination, but it's hard to be sure. The kid was born nine weeks early, and that kind of skews my perspective. Among the routine, non-serious complications that came with it was that in the first few weeks in the hospital, he would sometimes forget to breathe, till an intensive-care nurse would tickle him and he would start up again. Very normal. His last week in the hospital, we slept in a room with him while he was hooked up to a blood-oxygen monitor. Eventually, after maybe the 20th time the machinery had beeped us out of sleep with a false or dubious warning-the baby rosy and oxygenated all the while-our annoyance became stronger than our fear, and we were ready to take him home.

And he was fine, and that would have been that, except he also developed asthma. Big deal, a lot of kids get asthma. Then just as we were moving back to the United States, last winter, he got a bad cold. I had learned not to worry about colds. Children are pretty tough. We took him to the pediatrician to be safe, so she could maybe prescribe him something if he really needed it. She checked his vital signs, blasted his lungs with an emergency dose of albuterol, and called an ambulance: respiratory distress and pneumonia.

So it's also possible, in this over-anxious world, to worry too little. I'm not the only person I know who has overlooked toddler pneumonia. I missed an ear infection for three days, too. The kid is in day care, where disease does flourish. The asthma really would make a flu infection more hazardous. I accept that he needs the vaccine.

But where is the vaccine? Weren't there supposed to be jackbooted public-heath officials ordering everyone to line up for shots? I am all in favor of forcible vaccination; anti-vaccine activists are degenerate idiots who deserve to get polio and live out their days in iron lungs while Child Protective Services takes away their children to be properly raised. Or tetanus. Get lockjaw and shut up and die. What's the point of living in 21st-century America if not to avoid dying of stupid, easily preventable disease? You just like listening to Miley Cyrus?

When I try to be a responsible member of the immunological herd, I get nowhere. While I was writing this, it occurred to me that the kid still also needs to get a shot for the regular, non-swine, non-sensational influenza. That gave me an extra excuse-no, an extra reason-to be calling the doctor, again. The H1N1 was still unavailable, still with no known delivery date. The regular flu shot? Also out of stock. Call back in a week.

Previously: Stroller-Bullying on the Red Line

Tom Scocca prefers to write for money, should you have some. Ask him yourself!

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What happened was, an opponent of health care reform punched someone in favor of health care reform. The person who likes health care, and socialism, retaliated by biting off the attacker's finger. Which I am sort of in favor of! This is America, bro! If you come and punch me, I will bite your finger off. I mean, right? This is why we can carry guns in Arizona and stuff.

This was totally a long time coming. Here's a fun fact! The corner where this health care demonstration was taking place was a fairly busy thoroughfare at the corner of the immense, hideous, life-sucking mall, surrounded by immense landscapes of parking lot. That mall had a really awesome arcade, at which I seem to recall briefly playing, poorly, Gorf. Heh.

Here is a first-person account:

The man in the orange shirt hit the pro-reform guy (I'm going to call him PR Guy just to keep the players straight). Hard. ( tweeted in real time) He punched him in the face, knocked him to the ground and into that thruway. As you can see from the photo, cars drive straight through that without stopping. The pro-reform guy could have been run over. He got up, tried to get back up on the curb, but Orange Shirt guy was in his face. Finger in his face, PR Guy standing, steps up to the curb, and there's a scuffle. Orange shirt seemed to have PR Guy in a hold, but again, I was across the street, so won't state that as absolute fact. Next thing I see is PR Guy's hat being tossed into the street, both yelling at one another, then Orange shirt walks away, PR Guy picks up hat and crosses to our side.

When he gets to our side, he tells a story in one sentence: "He punched me hard, straight in the face, so I bit his finger off."

Anyway, someone is in the hospital now, and isn't that Alanic.

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Well is it a dealbreaker, if there is no public option? That's what we said in June, and July! But did the president say it was a dealbreaker in June to the AMA? So what the president is saying is that the public option is optional, and what are you going to say to Congress who will blow up over this? I AM NOT A MEMBER OF CONGRESS. IT IS A PREFERRED OPTION. But also: the President can't live without a competitive option! Warning to fish: RAHM IS FISHING OUT WEST. Sidebar! Why shouldn't tax payers feel like suckers? AIG is a ROYAL MESS. Also, Gibbs: "I am conversant on cookies but they're slightly different than what we're talking about now." NO LAUGHS, THE END. Back to healthcare. In the past Obama used to use the word "MUST" have a public option and now, now there is no MUST IS THERE? Now the word is "preferred." But he used to say "MUST INCLUDE" and now he does not! WHY is Obama not here to clear things up? WE DON'T THINK THERE'S ANYTHING TO CLEAR UP, says Gibbs. Oh God then someone brought up Glenn Beck. Gibbs says Glenn Beck is not in his top 9000 choices on TV.

But there are upset liberals, who want the public option, and this is going back to square one? Well it's important to the President says Gibbs. But I guess "preferred."

Okay so now the press accepts that the public option is not a "dealbreaker." The final proposal has to satisfy "choice" and "competition" says Gibbs. So yes: back to square one.

Later there will be newspaper articles about this. And they will not make much sense because none of this does.

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At 2 a.m. on Friday, people started to line up for treatment. Most patients are local. Some drove in from San Francisco and a few folks came from Nevada. It's not a destitute crowd. Many are working families, though some attendees hail from shelters. Hundreds slept on the sidewalk outside of the Forum to be granted access around 6 a.m.

The patients are mostly black, Latino, and Korean residents of L.A.'s working class suburbs like Compton, Hawthorne and Boyle Heights. They are service workers, seniors, immigrants and children who have not seen a doctor since the day they were born.

The majority of people came to get their teeth fixed. During the first two days of service, RAM dentists have put in 947 fillings.

Dawna and I sat in the bleachers of the Forum. She is small woman with a nut-colored tan and sun-bleached hair. Dawna was about to be the 425th dental patient seen today. Dawna "was conceived on Venice beach" and currently lives in her van by the Venice boardwalk. She has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and anxiety. She takes her meals at a shelter. She can no longer chew food because of impacted incisors. Ten years ago, however, Dawna worked as a home health in aide in Texas and Alaska.

"When I eat," Dawna said, her hands clutching her jaw, "my gums bleed. I'm in pain all the time." She tells me that she hopes that the dentist will just pull her front row of teeth out.

They will. Crowns, caps, and fillings are expensive procedures that require follow-up, which patients can't afford. Most the dentists working on the floor are going to yank a bad tooth rather than try to restore it. By Saturday morning, RAM dentists had removed 471 teeth.

According to the registration volunteers, most RAM patients seeking medical attention suffered from chronic conditions: high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes. These are all conditions that spur other medical aliments. If patients who suffer from chronic conditions were able to receive care early and often, treatment would be less costly as conditions would be less severe.

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An example:

The scope of the health-care problem is almost unfathomable; the intricacies of the bills under consideration are many, and the legislative process moves at a pace that seems (for all of us living on Internet time) glacial. So instead we wage a sort of proxy war through small, symbolic narratives.

It's not just that big stories about important things are difficult to understand. It's that groups of people, with varying agendas, do not want you to understand the actual story.

That the Internet is easily excitable and people are restless is true; but what really matters is that the process of moving this micronews is easy now and can be done by any lobbyist, any Astroturfer, any cable stealth shock-jock. (Even you can try this at home! Perhaps you do.) The most important thing about the "nanostory" is that it is always presented through manipulation. It is packaged. What he calls meme warfare actually is warfare, and we don't have to look much further than OBAMA'S SENIOR CITIZEN DEATH PANELS to see that.

And if you're confused as to why OBAMA'S FINAL SOLUTION DEATH PANELS FOR YOUR GRANDMA are so captivating to the imagination of America-well, a nanostory is merely a successfully-launched propaganda wave. It's a talking point coupled with an image-and then presented on CNN as a "contention," which counts, to the moron talking heads who always claim to be "digging deeper," as "news."

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