How many people remember Rush Limbaugh's famous comment, "Roosevelt is Dead! His policies live on but we're in the process of doing something about that, too". The thing is that conservatives are not attacking recent ideas now but often ideas that are century old. For instance it was not Franklin, but Teddy Roosevelt who said that there should be a "Living wage" where a man can provide for his family and his children's education and medical problems, as well as insure a confortable nest egg for old age. And yet even today congress is loathe to raise the minimum wage up to the twelve dollars an hour it should be to match where it was on an inflation adjusted basis to where it was forty years ago. It was John Pastore who in August of 1964 beraded the Goldwater republicans for wanting to undo social security, "First by making it volentary, then by making it weaker and weaker, untill they have destroyed it" and to "Turn back the clock 32 years on all this social progress". I myself am ashamed of the fact that only a few years ago was hoping President Bush would allow Social Security recipients to invest their funds in the stock market and make more money. That would have been a disaster. In 1968 when I was in a motel in Panguich, Utah (?) I heard a republican convention keynote address where one of the applause lines was "What we need are fewer people on welfare rolls and more people on pay rolls". What's funny is that this is when the unemployment was only three & a half percent. One could only wish we had the same economic situation now as then. The thing with Lyndon Johnson is that he got things done. Hubert Humphrey campaigned on a slogan in 1948 of national medical health care when Truman was president. So by the perception of the liberals, the passage of Medi-Care in 1965 by LBJ was a long overdue event. I say all this so you all can keep our current contraversy on Health Care in perspective. There are some today who would roll back the clock a whole century before Teddy Roosevelt made his "living wage" speech.

The President has decided now to personally take this health care fight to the people by personally speaking at Town Hall meetings. Hopefully they have better security than they do at some of these gatherings. Roomers are that people like in New Hampshire and Vermont and Arizona are bringing guns to these meetings, sometimes strapping guns to their ankles. Needless to say anybody can see that guns and the sort of emotions generated in these Town Hall meetings makes for a highly volital combination and it seems only a matter of time before someone gets shot. The President is addressing issues such as the government wanting to euthanize grandma by depriving her of health care. If anybody is responsible for "rationed health care" it is the insurance companies, who mark people off for benign neglect and eventual death. My father was the victim of these sort of machinations. He died of an infected large intistine, which is not why he went to the hospital. He was also deprived of salt and water, and nobody to this day knows why. Yet this whole idea of the Obama Death Pannel has caught on among the American people. People seem perfectly willing to believe such fantastic roomers about their government. The other roomer that won't go away is how "wonderful" things are now with your current health coverage, and that the government would "force you out of a medical plan you love, because your boss would demand that you get on the government plan because it's cheaper". My only response here is that if the government can give you the same coverage at a lower price, why not take them up on it? It's really an issue between you and your employer, and not you and the government. Doctors hate the current system because before they can perform any procedure on you they have to check to see if it's covered. I was just throwing out some old mail from 2001 and there were two bills I had to pay out of my own pocket for procedures done on me in the hospital that wern't covered by my insurance. But as I said in the previous posting, I do not believe any of these protests are spontanious. They have all been orchestrated by the insurance companies, who are forking out big bucks in order that congress defeat any health plan and to keep things the way they are now.