As hyperbolic as this question may sound....it is actually a valid and serious question. It IS terrifying not knowing how you are going to be able for health care for yourself and your family. We are at a real crossroads in this country....we are either going to fall into a full-blown fascist plutocracy or we will REALLY fight back and save this once-great democracy. Right now, if I were betting, I can't say I would vote that we are going to survive...the elite simply has taken over every aspect of our society and country.

I think ALL Democratic organizations across the country should add 'anti-american' to their talking points vocabulary when talking about the republican threat to health care, Big buisiness' outsourcing and opression of the middle class and the slow quiet erosion of each Individual American's right to speak, protest or even gather in the interest of our 'Common Welfare'.

I also think that 'entitlement' word should be UN-demonized and Republicans called out when they use it as we are 'entitled' to such things because WE ALREADY PAID FOR THEM, as I think I heard thom state it on Monday.

To listen to the wealthy and people who want to be wealthy or people who, operating on some philosophical objections to estate taxes, etc., and support the wealthy's objections to any objections by people opposed to the recent "Obama Tax Cuts" of 2010 ... you'd almost be left thinking that any, and I mean any, attempt to restore the estate tax rates to the pre-Bush 43 tax cuts, was nothing short of "Bolshevisim" and "confiscation of wealth."

The more I let a little lecture I received along that line from a close relative, not only had I become sadder and angrier about the depth of selfishness behind such thinking, the wiser I became as to the intellectual or philosophical lengths they'd stretch their arguments in favor of perpetually keeping all their wealth in their and their respective heirs' hands. Many people in my baby boom generation never had to worry about their health care costs being met thanks to their parents jobs in the government or through the unions if their parents worked in factories and other areas covered by organized labor.

As they grew up, many of them grew mentally old, cold, and selfish. "Hey, we're talking about my hard earned tax dollars!" They astoninshingly enough forgot what they benefitted so greatly from and turned inwards. Perhaps out of pure selfishness at first, but mostly out of fear, raw and oft-times manipulated fear...which later turned to simple raw selfishness.

Who are the enablers of this selfishness? The Right. I know because I was part of it. I interned at the National Journalism Center in the early 80s. But it was a different time and while the NJC is decidedly conservative, its leaders from columnist M. Stanton Evans and his staff were meticulous when it came to avoiding partisan biases and making sure we really put FACTS before sloganeering (i.e. "fair and balanced.") in whatever we covered and wrote about.

The Center however, could not control the other influences of a far greedier and more politically ambitious group of young conservatives then beginning to flex their ideological muscles. I even attended the Leadership Institute in the mid-80s but soon learned that for a young family guy trying to make his mark on Capitol Hill, wives and kids, especially infant sons, were a potential liability. So much for the family values crowd.

It wasn't until the rise of the Limbaugh brothers, Jack Abramoff and his ilk, and a lot of President Bush (43)'s hanger ons, the more ideologically virulent bunch of free-market conservatives, did the veil of ugliness really begin to fall in ways nobody could've predicted. Simply, who could have or would have publicly suggested that a generation of real "Mr. Potters" of Hollywood ill-fame were rising on Capitol Hill, along K-Street and doing all they could to encourage the professional dog-fighting that Wall Street had become after they received help from Bill Clinton's Bob Rubin and Alan "I love Ayn Rand" Greenspan. If you had written such a script or predicted this ten or more years ago people would've branded you as a conspiratorial nut-job, a paranoid walking time-bomb. I saw a lot of this coming, but I didn't want to believe it much less come right out and say so because I would've been laughed out of consideration for getting any of my writings published, on anything.

Economic terrorism isn't simply a bomb going off in a bank. It's not rigging a check kiting scandal or pulling off a Madoff. It's not even what we watch in the movies. If the banks were too big to fall and the whole edifice of all the capitalist institutions too massive to fall ... so the thinking went ... then it was too late to realize that we were looking at the equivalent to a nuke packed in the back of a minivan parked outside a bank and the ticker was down in the single digits.

Economic terrorism on the scale I'm writing about and Tom and Louise are concerned about here could've only succeeded in growing within an atmosphere of massive deliberate denial caused a constant drumbeat of "talking points" from various sources who had the most to gain from this campaign of distortion and warping peoples' (otherwise) better judgments. How else can we explain why so many people bought into the "Tea Party" line so easily when in fact, most Tea Party supporters were lied into voting against their best interests? Who is behind this? Right now we know it's Dick Armey, the Koch Brothers and other rightist cabals. No thanks to the Citizens decision by the Supreme Court last year, the next crop of mind manipulators may never even be disclosed at all. I've always been more "hawkish" on foreign policy, but when I think of what Julian Assange pulled off, we may need him or another person like him to pull down the curtain from the next wizards of ooze and Wall Street/K-Street and Capitol Hill slimy machinations. Because if we don't, they'll be able to cow us through a carefully concerted campaign of ideological half-truths and outright lies to get us into buying into the notion that opposition to Helen Walton, Queen of the Ozarks' $32B estate tax-avoidance windfall ... which we'll all wind up paying for ... is akin to calling for "confiscatory Bolshevik taxation measures."

Using ideological bullying tactics through sloganeering with labels like "Bolshevik" is terrorism. But you won't hear them admit so in a million years. But whose money, on a grossly disproportionate level is really being confiscated for Helen Walton and greed-knows-no-bounds-clan that's wrecked so many small businesses owners and ironically enough helped to put them in their graves much earlier due to stresses and heart attacks with less to pass on to their heirs? And have you heard the reposte to this concern? "Hey, if these losers couldn't compete with Wal-Mart, that's tough crappers." Believe it or not, I've heard remarks like that coming from some very devout Christians who were eaten alive by this supposedly "Christian/family values oriented" big box empire that outsources the manufacturing of Christmas creches to be sold for as little as five bucks over here and they come packaged in formaldehyde shrink wrap. How many American crafters of creches, of which I'm one, can "compete" with that. Zilch. But I don't try to. I DO TRY TO HELP LEAVE THE PUBLIC MORE INFORMED ABOUT THE FATAL THREAT OF ECONOMIC TERRORISM CAUSED BY CORPORATE INTERESTS WHO ARE MORE INTERESTED IN KEEPING THE PUBLIC UNINFORMED ABOUT THEIR PAST SINS, PRESENT SINS AND FUTURE MANIPULATIONS OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY AND PUBLIC TO COME.

I happen to be a social conservative/fiscal liberal. If that leaves you thinking I'm a rare bird, so be it. My views are guided by the principle that conservatism isn't a matter of conserving all the paper bills and coins one can amass. It's about conserving and protecting human dignity from the moment of our conception to our deaths (hopefully by natural causes.) And likewise, to do justice for those whose lives were cut short by others. Sometimes, though rarely done so deliberately, businesses will behave carelessly and people will die as a result of negligence or poor judgment. These victims, too, deserve to be given the justice of bringing the corporate and othe business criminals to justice and if found guilty, brought to pay an appropriate form of punishment either in terms of great fines, jail, both and certainly the disgrace which comes from a justly reached guilty verdict.

I also believe that if we can spend money to give tax breaks to foreign companies, we can help our domestic first responders without having to resort to weasel tactics and buck-passing down to states, which is what's happening with regards to the 9/11 First Responders It's a form of verbal and philosphical terrorism to treat millions of people as bums because they haven't found jobs after 99 weeks whereas in other industrialized nations they wouldn't be subjected to this abuse and keep on receiving UE checks. The same damn class of parasites responsible for creating so many job losses remains shameless in its willingness to blame the victims of their own greed. They were bailed out with TARP. But the vast number of their employees who lost their jobs are told, again, "tough crappers."

And like all terrorists ... the parasites at the top don't give a damn about the extent of the collateral damage they've caused, and will continue causing, so long as it doesn't show up on their books or cause their investors reasons to wring their hands.

It has always amazed me , how universal health care is viewed in the US , you only have to look at how the health care system works in Canada and realize that Canada is very much like the US in terms of income and culture , Our system is not perfect but I for one would probably be dead or bankrupt without it. Isn't it obvious that the real problem is corporate greed and political corruption.

Republican hypocrisy is so rampant as to be tsunami of hypocrisy. They are the "pro" life party and yet 45,000 Americans die every year from lack of access to health care. I'm one of those 50 million without insurance because of a preexisting condition. Unfortunately the part that will help me is 3 years away. Medicare is 5 years away. Without the extra help that community clinics are receiving because of the health care bill, I'd be totally up shit crik without a paddle. Our health care crisis is a moral outrage and those "right to lifers" are "right to die ers".