It's always nice to see a journalist who gets it, and Mike Lupica understands what's really going on with the anti-healthcare reform protesters:

The woman went to an airplane hangar in Belgrade, Mont., the other day, prepared to actually listen to President Obama talk about health care reform in America.

She has watched, the way the rest of us have watched, as the debate about health care has turned into a sideshow and in some cases even more of a freak show than Glenn Beck's. Now she wanted to see for herself, along with more than 1,000 others, if it would happen this way in Montana.

This is what she said about the event when it was over:

"Yes, there were a few protesters en route. But the Montanans who were excited to hear the President far outnumbered the fringe groups."

Then she said this about Obama: "He was smart, fair, funny."

So this wasn't an occasion when people with legitimate concerns and legitimate points to make were overwhelmed by the wing nuts and screamers who take their marching orders from right-wing radio and television and the Internet.

Those idiots come to these town hall meetings more to be seen than heard, and think creating chaos makes them great Americans.

Those people have been convinced by the current culture that we are dying to hear from them, and the louder the better. People who think that all they need to star in their own reality series is a couple of TV crews. But then this is Twitter America now, where no thought is supposed to go unspoken.

We hear that all of this is democracy in action. It's not. It's boom-box democracy, people thinking that if they somehow make enough noise on this subject, they can make Obama into a one-term President.

The most violent opposition isn't directed at his ideas about health care reform. It is directed at him. It is about him. They couldn't make enough of a majority to beat the Harvard-educated black guy out of the White House, so they will beat him on an issue where they see him as being most vulnerable.

In the process, they'll come after him on health care the way Kenneth Starr went after Bill Clinton on oral sex in the Oval Office.

With that kind of zealotry, screaming about government programs as if Medicare isn't one. It is why so many of them, all these wild-eyed red faces in the crowd, look completely certifiable, screaming about how Obama wants to kill Grandma, as if he's suddenly turned into Jack Kevorkian.

No, not your attitude. She really thinks you need to bathe more. I'm completely serious.

AFL-CIOblog:

High school gym, where listening to lectures on personal hygiene was part of the package. It's one thing for a gym teacher to tell a bunch of sweaty teenagers to hit the showers. But it's something quite different when the U.S. secretary of labor tells Parade magazine-a national weekly read by millions of Americans-the nation's workers need a bath if they want to keep their jobs.[..]

Chao told Parade it's not just the low-cost of foreign labor that is enticing many U.S. employers to ship jobs overseas-overseas workers dress and bathe better.

Beyond the cheaper cost of labor, U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. "American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene," says Chao.

Alex Bastani, AFGE Local 12 president,[..] noted that in 2004, Chao's Labor Department changed the rules on who qualifies for overtime pay and millions of workers were robbed of their rights to overtime pay. Just this year, she tried to outsource some 250 Department of Labor jobs but was unsuccessful.

Members of the AFGE Local 12 chapter will be at Department of Labor headquarters passing out the above-pictured bars of soap. And I would be remiss to not remind you who is Chao's (presumably clean-smelling) husband...