The reason people oppose the public option is not because we're a bunch of trolls that want to let people die, or to spread misinformation - it's beucase the design of the public "option" will inherently cause it to eventually become a mandatory public plan. Why? Because it WILL drive private insurance out of business. Why? Becuase private insurance that must run at a profit (or at least break even) won't be able to compete with a public plan that can and will be run at a loss. By it's design, there's no way the public "option" could ever turn a profit. And it will have an unlimited supply of money (taxes, for one) to run it. I mean honestly, when the times comes where people say we need to pump more money into the public "option", do you honestly think the tax-and-spend democrats would vote that down? The result: The public "option" will be run in the red with continuous capital infusions, and will drive private insurance out of business. That's what scares us: that this public "option" will become mandatory government-run healthcare.

Did it ever occur to you that if for-profit companies cannot deliver effective, affordable health insurance in a world of high-tech medical costs, perhaps they shouldn't survive?

Making money for shareholders off of people's sickness - in what is essentially a free market - is obscene and immoral. Affordable, accessible health insurance for everyone should be a basic human service just like police and fire protection and other protections provided by non-profit, public, tax-supported institutions.

eyes were crawling the ceilings and staring out windows, while hands were fidgiting with supplies, text-messaging under desks, poking the nearest classmate, etc.

Nothing, absoluting nothing, is so boring to kids across the entire socio-economic-ethic spectrum than adults - any adults -exhorting them to study hard and do well in school.

What a tempest in a demi tasse.

Make that "ethnic", not "ethic".

"MAD MEN DOES NOT IN ANY WAY DEPICT THE 1960s"

arsene, how old are you? I'm 76 and that is pretty much what I experienced in my early years as a professional woman from the mid- 50s to the mid-60s. MM has got the gender relationships exactly right from the boorish behavior the secretaries endured, to the Ob-Gyn doctor's behavior toward his patient Peggy, to the psychiatrist's unprofessional treatment of Beth in discussing her case with her husband as if she were a minor.

In that decade, I lived through the pre- and post- Feminine Mystique years. I can relate to the MM women who are just beginning to get intimations of "getting it".

(Full discosure: I've come late to the MM series via Netflix and have seen only seasons 1-3. I'm looking forward to watching Episode 1 of Season Four tonight.))

I am so with you on this. I remember my winters of discontent at home with a couple of lovely pre-school children, while moss was growing on my frontal lobes, living in an intellectually sterile suburban social mileau.

Though I forget the magazine I was getting at the time, I'll never forget the profound effect the article by some Smith(?) graduate, who went underground to do an investigative report on the demeaning state of Playboys waitresses, had on me. Thoujg never having even wited tabls in a neighborhod bar, the deeper message in her series resonated with me.

Though I never waited tables, Steinem's series of articles on her experience had a profound influence on me.

... being driven up and down the expressway for (how long was it? 35 minutes? 45?) with the TV cameras unblinkingly on, and much of America watching, watching, watching...

From the cited Bloomberg review:

Branden and his wife, Barbara, became Rand and O’Connor’s best friends when they all moved to New York in the early 1950s. The younger couple was part of the inner circle, known as the Collective, that gathered at Rand’s New York apartment on Saturday nights. Alan Greenspan was also a member in good standing.

Sometime in the late 50s, a friend of mine was visiting New York. He saw a notice in the paper for an oppotunity to meet with Ayn at the apartment. Since the meeting was open to the public he went. My friend recounted to me that a young women there commented to Ayn that in one one of her novels (Fountainhead?)a woman subsequently falls in love with a man who, upon first meeting her, rapes her. "Who," asked the young woman rhetorically, "possibly would want to be raped?"

"I would," said AYN.

Scozzafava translates lterally as "Scottish bean".

"The USA PATRIOT ACT was over 300 pages long, and Congress voted to approve it the day after it was submitted, without reading it. They voted "yes," save one."

Actually, it was only in the Seanate there was only a single no Feingild - may his tribe increase). In the House, there were 66 noes.

A donor boycott for the the first two demands is a powerful strategy for a realistic goal, but the demand to kill the DMA is asking for results the Democrat Party - even if it were willing to go there, which it isn't - is undeliverable; not enough Americans are there yet, given the initiative outcomes in California and Maine.

“Some leaders in the media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond my role here at CNN and engage in constructive problem-solving,”

I haven't laughed this hard since I

listened to Fred Allen on radio.

So is this fool admitting that his zenophobic schtik wasn't "constructive"?