'Reid My Lips: Last Night Was a Disaster'

So sayeth T.A. Frank at The New Republic's website:

Why Harry Reid agreed to have a debate with Sharron Angle is a bit of a mystery to me. If your campaign is based on portraying your opponent as loony, then why give that opponent a chance to look reasonable? Lyndon Johnson never debated Barry Goldwater. Then again, I’m no political strategist. And neither, I’ve come to see, is Harry Reid. So let’s focus on what matters now: that a debate was held in Nevada last night between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and his Republican challenger Sharron Angle. And its upshot was—sorry, folks—that Angle improved her chances.

While reading Frank's piece, I realized I was remiss in not quoting Reid's full response on why insurance companies must be compelled by law to cover things like mammograms and colonoscopies. Here it is in all its glory:

We need them to be forced to do mammograms. That’s why you see breast cancer awareness month. You see the baseball players wearing pink shoes, and you the football players having pink, uh, uh, helmets. It’s because people dread breast cancer, and you don’t get breast cancer, you can—correct breast cancer—you detect it if you do mammograms. Colonoscopies, if you do colonoscopies, colon cancer does not come because you snip off the—things they find when they go up and—no more, and we need to have insurance companies do this…

Sharron Angle, after meandering just a bit, gave this clear and concise (and true!) answer: "The free market will weed out those companies that don’t offer as many choices and don’t have a cost effective system.”