Last night I muted MSNBC but left the set on to keep up with late returns, settled in with my laptop to plow through the backlog in my feed reader, and tripped acrossthis excellent video interview with DIY force of nature Rachel Flotard, frontwoman for Visqueen, who you might remember from a WWTFUS afew weeks back.

Even if you’re not a power pop fan, it’s worth taking the time to watch because, come on, who among us doesn’t like hearing a talented, articulate (and also very hot) scrappy woman from Jersey talk about fighting the good fight?

In Flotard’s case, that was clawing her way back into the music business, on her own terms, after taking some years off to care for her terminally ill father. It’s a good story that led to adamn good album that, despite its inspiration, is full of life and fun.

But the reason I’m bringing this piece here is because of a timely coincidence: while I was listening to Flotard talk about healthcare, unions, and insurance on the computer, themiserably-run campaign of poultry-based healthcare advocate and would-be Nevada Senate candidate Sue Lowden was crashing, like a giant chicken plummeting into a fiery sea. The pundits on my muted TV were having a field day. There seems to be consensus that Lowden’s wackadoo ‘let them pay with chickens’ faux pas was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, not the sole reason for her loss, but I’m not going down the Reid vs. teaparty vs. Republicans trail.

Sticking with the healthcare piece, the reason the chicken joke drew so much fire wasn’t just because it was stupid and ridiculous, it was because, as Cenkperfectly captures here, it was “being flippant with other people’s lives because she never had that problem.”

The comment and subsequent doubling-down was testament to how profoundly (as in from-another-fucking-planet) out of touch it was with the everyday lives of real Americans foundering on the rocks of the health care system.

People like you, me, and Rachel Flotard:

Would-be policymakers and powerbrokers as detached from the real world as Lowden deserve to crash and burn and have the world ridicule them. The problem is that too many of them still don’t, and they still never bother to think about us down here with our little problems.