At this point it’s all we’ve got

What? Who's telling you that you should support this bill?

By the by, it's not "your" money. It's our money, theoretically, you know We the People and all that jazz. Or are we working under the assumption that all animals are created equal but some animals are more equal than others?

But yet I doubt that you care about your pennys that go to bombing little brown babies overseas.

well I don't want a single penny of my money to go towards educating your child, who's bound to grow up a closed-minded twit like yourself. I agree - the less YOU depend on the government the better

I am Arab. I am more than happy to send dollars, instead of pennies to get rid of any tyranny.

It is my money. I earned it. My Freedom and Rights come from God, not the government.

Did your parents teach you to grow up to talk this way? Perhaps you achieved this high level of ignorance all on your own. I would never ever want anything from you that would ever have anything to do with any of my children.

I don't know why they'd want to turn down 30,000,000 new customers. Maybe they're spending the money to get Obama to drop a few more things out of the bill for them.

Because this bill is going to replace the current crooks with a new batch, that's why they are lobbying against it...la familia nueva!

Have you noticed how well health insurance stocks have performed? Have you noticed that the bill contains a mandate to purchase their product...but no regulation on the rates they charge. All these new customers and the federal government will act as the collection agency. Win-Win for the insurance industry. And they didn't lobby to have it defeated; they lobbied to write it.

ding, ding, ding, ding, we have a winner!

and take a really good look at this website, Lockheed Martin, in terms of contract dollars awarded, probably the biggest defense contractor on the planet...but behold, they've been gearing up for health care reform for a while, and not just health care, they have a veritable Smörgåsbord of delightful tools at the ready to manage our lives:

http://www.lockheedmartin.com/isgs/

Ha! It's a picture from my hometown of Detroit...and i swear, our politicians are trying to turn the whole country into a replica of The D.

I did see Capitalism, a Love Story this weekend. Capitalism is cooked. What we have is Plutonomy. Since tea-baggers fear Socialism they will do anything to protect Plutonomy. Corporations can sell Chinese wares for whatever they want, and SCOTUS made it possible for corporations to give all of that money to politicians. Plutonomy will now become a full blown Plutocracy.

The house I saw is actually Flagstaff, Arizona. Flagstaff was in and out of a state of emergency this winter because they've had 200+ inches of snow with some storms leaving as much as 3 feet at a time. When I was there we had to walk through 5 feet of unshoveled snow just to get to the front porch (which was collapsing). The inside of the house was worse - it smelled so bad I couldn't wait to get back outside into the cold.

I saw the film recently myself. And since i'm not only native to SE Michigan but also just old enough to remember the times Moore describes with nostalgia, it hit home for me pretty hard.

He's right about the Plutonomy, and you're right about the Plutocracy...if not Oligarchy. But i'm not so sure that capitalism is irredeemably crooked. What's obvious is that the neo-liberal version of it is a recipe for disaster. Markets don't regulate themselves for the good of the majority. Capitalism needs to be regulated and harnessed...directed so that the majority of its benefits go to the most possible recipients.

The type who hold Walmart up as a model of capitalist perfection hate America. Capitalist perfection would be a network of thriving towns and cities populated by millions of self-employed people. It would be a place where the factories are manned by workers who make a living wage. It would be a place where FDR's economic bill of rights was in place so that markets could function efficiently and serve people instead of CEO's and Wall Street traders.

The US has the second lowest percentage of its population self-employed when compared with other developed nations. What's the big difference between us and the rest of those nations? Well, most of those nations have the majority of FDR's economic bill of rights...especially health care.

But we're not gonna see anything like that. Both legacy parties are completely beholden to neo-liberalism and the death spiral that it invariably produces. The best we can hope for is that when it all falls down there will be enough thoughtful, intelligent people and salvageable pieces to put it back together again. But my guess is that we'll end up with totalitarianism instead.

I still love capitalism too. Conservatives and liberals who remember across the United States would agree if faced with the reality of the question - the problem with capitalism isn't too left or too right, the problem is this: it is non-existent. People don't make money for their hard work anymore, even when there is little hard work to do. People make money off money they already have, or from the money that friends or family have. If we want to have money in America we have to run from our own family when they become sick or old. People used to be able to organize into unions so that free enterprise was a two-way street. Corporations looking to cut labor costs were able to convince America that if wanted a job they needed to compete against third world nations without labor standards, environmental standards, safety standards and every other standard.

Without capitalism people had no choice but to go left toward socialism or to the right toward plutonomy. That's the reason for the extreme political polarism. Neither of these can provide the same drive to innovation as capitalism. To get people going again Americans need an affordable education and a new industrial base. If our best engineers could reduce the cost of solar cell manufacturing processes, (or some other alternative energy source) then product demand will drive down costs to the point where crude would become obsolete. At least that would provide some avenue toward recovery.

Without capitalism, I have to agree, America will eventually deteriorate to dictatorship. My guess is that a right-wing dictatorship would be more cruel than a left-wing dictatorship, but then, I want neither.