It's a doozy. From Paul Krugman, we have the story of why President Bush loves outsourcing everything, from emergency management to the army. Krugman refers specifically to the recent Blackwater controversy in Iraq, in which the U.S. contract-security firm may have killed 8-20 Iraqi civilians without any reason. This is just business as usual for the Bush administration, which trumpets the virtues of the private sector over those of the government:

But it's also worth noting that the Bush administration has tried to privatize every aspect of the U.S. government it can, using taxpayers' money to give lucrative contracts to its friends -- people like Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, who has strong Republican connections. You might think that national security would take precedence over the fetish for privatization -- but remember, President Bush tried to keep airport security in private hands, even after 9/11.

The private sector has, in the last six years, entered many areas of the government, usually with anything but virtue. Remember 2005, when it was revealed that Halliburton subsidiary KBR overcharged the government for meals that were never delivered and laundry that was never washed -- or that never even existed?

The best way for rich investors to make money is to get government contracts. Here's how the process works, in my Handy Guide to Outsourcing the Government:

1. Get a friend of yours inside the government. In this case, we have Dick Cheney, formerly CEO of Halliburton (and who still receives a pension from them).
2. Have your friend (or your friend's cronies) appoint incompetent officials to positions of power in the hope that those officials will act as incompetently as you hope.
3. Wait for a major crisis to happen. Inevitably, the incompetent official will really screw something up.
4. Point to that official's failure as an example of why the government should not be in the business of doing whatever it was that official did. Explain that the private sector could have done it cheaper and more efficiently.
5. Outsource a previously government-run department to a private company; bonus points if it's run by that friend of yours. Triple Word Score if your friend's company gets a no-bid contract for unexplainable reasons.
6. Stand idly by as your friend's company overcharges the government for services it never provided, wastes taxpayers' money, and performs an even more incompetent job than the stupid plant did before.
7. Don't hold any hearings. Don't investigate. If journalists ask questions about why a company that is doing a terrible job is still receiving no-bid contracts, flat out don't answer the question. Or change the subject. Or say that you can't talk about it because "it's under investigation."
8. The problem will go away on its own. Your friend will leave the company, the company will be broken up, or purchased by another company, and you'll replace the incompetent officials with some mildly competent ones -- but not before you receive some sweet kickbacks from that friend of yours!

Next, from Philip Boffey, the use of the nasty "s-word." It was brought up repeatedly by opponents of the State Children's Health Insurance Program expansion. (The word is "socialism," by the way.) How are Republicans claiming that not expanding healthcare for uninsured children -- children! -- is a good thing? They're pulling the old Soviet ghosts out of the closet, dusting them off, and brandishing them with as much scare as a 50-year-old straw man can be brandished. Dana Perino, the president's spokeswoman, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, both used "socialized medicine" to refer to the SCHIP program. Expanding the program, they say, is just the Democrats' way of getting their foot in the door so that they can sneak Dr. Stalin and Dr. Castro in to perform unnecessary surgery on your right to pay way too much money to a private insurance company (and then spend the next six months in customer support hell as you try to explain that the surgery to remove your almost-exploded gallbladder really wasn't frivolous).

Boffey points out that, in making these arguments, Republican opponents (and they are all Republican) of SHCIP ignore the fact that we already have socialized medicine in this country, in the form of Medicare, Medicaid, and VA hospitals.

Your grandmother is being strangled by Karl Marx right now! Our boys in uniform are being slaughtered by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, who's been dressed up to look like Che Guevara! Except that millions of Americans use socialized medicine, and they aren't trying to topple the government and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat. Paul Krugman once observed that opponents of socialized medicine use hip surgeries as a benchmark for efficacy of medical treatment. The United States, he says, has the best record for hip surgery in the world. But what those opponents fail to note is that hip surgeries are, by and large, performed on the elderly -- the same elderly who are using Medicare. In their attempt, then, to prove that socialized medicine is not as good as "private" medicine, opponents of socialized medicine have only confirmed that socialized medicine is better than private medicine.

In the same way that Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth propelled global warming from its status of "maybe it's not happening" to "we need to do something about this right now," so too has Michael Moore's Sicko brought government healthcare into the light. It's no longer a debate about whether or not we should have it, but when we're going to have it and what it will look like. This film single-handedly clued Americans into how broken, unfair, and stupid our medical system really is. The issue can no longer be shuttled back into the shadows by Republicans (like former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose family runs one of the nation's largest private hospital systems).