President Obama just signed the health care reform bill! Can you believe he actually pulled this thing off? Now he can begin what will presumably be the generation-long effort to fix the damn thing.

Among the things that need to be done: make the state-based exchanges national, allow for a public option, boost federal funding for Medicaid, and generally make the subsidies better. Those are all things that a simple majority in both houses could take care of without too much trouble—the public option, remember, is very popular. (As is a Medicare expansion! That is another great idea and at some point we should just "expand" Medicare to "everyone," but I am certainly not holding my breath.)

But the point of this massive clusterfuck that we just concluded was actually to just put in place the architecture for a sensible civilized national health care system. (Yes, this is the secret socialist Trojan Horse menace that The Corner warned you about, except that this plan will lead us nowhere near the Socialism unless, at some point, millions of Americans decide that the Socialism would be a nicer and more secure way to run this nutty system, and elect some Socialists.)

In the immediate term, the party should not support in any fashion the Democrats who voted against the fucking thing (they're useless—there's no point in having a seat on the "D" side of the aisle from some fucking red district if they're not actually going to support the centerpiece of the Democratic platform for 50 years), and the party should also do something about these fucking anti-women assholes who basically attempted to derail the entire thing until the bill was sufficiently destructive to women's health. (They should do something like sentence them to a trillion hours of community service at health centers and family planning clinics for impoverished women, though I'd also be fine with primary challenges.) And, you know, some immigration reform would be nice, because this bill does not do much for many millions of people who work very hard and generally make this country a very nice place to be.

(Barack Obama's speech has been very nice and seeing Joe Biden always brightens up my day. And god I wish Harry Reid was a bit more like Nancy Pelosi.)