If only I had time to read this book.

That way when we retake congress and try to change this mess we can point out to people that the ill effects have yet to hit.

That’s considered a cadillac plan isn’t it?

It is my understanding that social security and medicare were popular when they were voted on. I think it is possible (if not easy) to push it back before it sinks in its hooks.

“According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

As crude as Nixon or LBJ could be in private, before this administration, could anyone have imagined that the President of the United States would use a degrading sexual slur of this kind, in an address to legislators, to describe the people of his own country? How on earth did we GET here?

The “democratic process” empowered a *democracy* to execute Socrates, and a few millenia later empowered the government of 1930′s Germany – and we all know how well THAT turned out.

There really was nothing in between those two events to establish a democracy as preferable form of government over a republic.

Secondly, those other countries you mention do not have millions of illegal immigrants in them. They are in fact quite homogenous populations compared to ours, which makes an enormous difference in what people will shell out. Apples and oranges.

When things look that simple, so that you ask “what could go wrong?” I have to consider you a person who should in no way have a say over my wallet or my culture. You may have that right in law, but you do not have it in morality or reason, and I will resist giving you any more authority than the law allows.

Absorb this thought: if it really were about health care for poor people, conservatives would be less opposed – certainly less energised. Lots of us would still think it a bad idea to centralise authority and increase entitlements, but hell, the government always does stupid expensive things that we grouse about. Our point is that this is not going to be anything like what it is advertised as. Nearly everything that is being put forward as an argument in favor of this reform will turn out to be completely irrelevant in the long run. You think you are coming onto the lot to buy a car. The contract you will sign will donate money to a money-losing commuter rail system instead, and you will have no car.