Paglia is a fun read, but she has to stop getting her information on the health care bill from her crush, Sean Hannity.

A rip-off of the elderly? Humm...a funny thing happened on the way to the forum....AARP endorsed the bill! Maybe the savings due to a crackdown on fraud, a reduction in the "senior plus" subsidy to insurers, etc. etc. won't be as large as hoped, but to call this "The brutal abandonment of the elderly" is nonsense.

As for the creation of a " federal bureaucracy (that) would slow and disrupt the delivery of basic healthcare and subject us all to a labyrinthine mass of incompetent, unaccountable petty dictators?"--what does she think the current private health care providers, with their denials of care as not medically necessary, experimental, etc, and pre-existing conditions cancellations, amount to?

In fact, the most well liked health plans in the country--Medicare, Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, the VA, and state, county and city employee plans, are all "government plans", to one degree or another, and the Federal Employees Plan has done a good job controlling costs.

As for the allegedly monstrous cost of the plan, FOR ABOUT HALF OF WHAT WE SPEND EVERY YEAR IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN, we could pay for health care for everyone. FOR ABOUT 15% OF WHAT WE SPEND EVERY YEAR ON THE WILDLY WASTEFUL DEFENSE BUDGET, we could fund health care.

Moreover, Pelosi says that cost reductions and increased taxes on cadillac plans will cover the costs, and the CBO apparently agrees.

Camile, its time to start weaning yourself off Limbaugh, Hannity, and the other haters--at least do your homework before launching attacks such as this.

Whenever conservatives, neo-cons and manly men like Brooks want to invade a Muslim country, they do it for the women!!! Oh, they care sooo much about women's rights--except when Israel is blowing the hell out of Gaza, or Lebanon, and well, they can't spend any significant money on the million or so Iraqi women and girls living exile and in misery in Syria and Jordan, and heaven forbid they allow more than a handful of them refugee status in the United States, but, but, they really, really care--which is why they've bombed Afghanistan and Iraq backwards by a generation, which disproportionately harms women. And they've made hundreds of thousands of women widows in Iraq and Afghanistan, but gosh, they're now free to starve, or sell themselves into prostitution.

The neo-cons cared so much about women's rights in Afghanistan, that they blew out of there while the country was still unstable, to pursue their wet-dream of conquering Iraq, on the way to Iran--fun, fun fun, and all for women's rights.

And of course, our conservative friends care so much about women that they direct the US to vote against UN treaties and resolutions regarding women's rights, and they oppose a woman's right to choose, and they don't think contraception is such a great idea either, and heaven forbid we spend half of what goes down the drain in Iraq and Afghanistan every year to provide health insurance to women right here in the United States, but other than that, they really, really, care about women's rights.

The same cabal who lied us into a war with Iraq are at it again with Iran. As I understand the rules, a nation which has signed the NPT (which Iran has and Israel has not) is permitted to build a nuclear facility, and tell no one, until it is within 6 months of beginning operations. Its not even near to being operational, yet the neo-cons are hysterical.

Obama has proven again that he is a quick study, demonstrating an hypocrisy at the UN that would make Bush proud-Speaking of Iran, he noted that "international law is not an empty promise; that obligations must be kept; and that treaties will be enforced.
" This is particularly rich, given that neither the IAEA nor our own intelligence agencies believe weaponization is going on in Iran.

Eyes must have been rolling at the UN and around the world as Obama made this unbelievable statement, but the irony was completely lost on the brain dead major media in the US

I seem to recall a couple of treaties the US has ratified that ban torture, and require that every signatory state prosecute anyone who commits, aid or abets torture.

It is a violation of international law to invade a country that is not an imminent threat.

It is a violation of international law to acquire territory by conquest, and to abuse the civilian population subject to an occupation--Israel's brutal settlements in the West Bank and the Golan have been declared illegal under international law by the Security Council on a number of occasions...

So when is Mr. "treaties will be enforced
" Obama going to show some balls, and enforce the international law violated by Bush and Israel?--let me make a "wild" guess--NEVER!

At a time when the US intelligence community has only recently affirmed its 2007 report that there is no evidence that Iran is pursuing a weapons program (www.newsweek.com/id/215529) the US foreign policy establishment, lead by neo-con Hillary, is making ever more hysterical claims about the Iranian "threat." See many of physicist Gordon Prather's articles debunking the Iranian "threat", such as original.antiwar.com/prather/2009/09/18/why-no-dancing-in-the-streets.

What a dismal situation. Our foreign policy is in the hands of Israeli agents and stupid politicians. The same group that was so hideously wrong on Iraq, is still in charge.