"If Obama adopted the Repub health care plan he would become a legend."

That is the most ridiculous thing I've read today.

If the Democrats try to move to the center and listen to the Republicans they will start losing elections. They were elected on a promise of CHANGE and that is what voters want. We want new trade policies to bring manufacturing jobs home, we want health care reform, we want credit card reform, bank regulation and reform, new bankruptcy laws, etc. If the Dems become our leaders against the corporate oligarchy they will retain power.

"Obama's ratings are dropping like a stone"

Sorry, that is simply not true.

"AS a country we are broke, we have no real dollars to spend on anything, unless of course we print or borrow and at this point either of those options are disastrous."

Nice of you to finally notice, it didn't seem to bother Republicans when Bush decided to invade Iraq, didn't seem to bother Republicans when he passed a huge tax cut for the rich, didn't seem to bother Republicans when they passed the Medicare Drug bill which forbids negotiating with BigPharma for lower prices but all of a sudden the sky is falling????

"WITHIN THAT LIMIT, debate on domestic, military, social, economic or whatever type spending is legit."

There's more than one way to skin a cat, I say raise taxes back to pre-Reagan levels. Cutting spending would mean eliminating jobs and right now that is exactly the wrong thing to do.
Raise taxes, offer deductions for domesting investment into job creating enterprises, penalize investment overseas. Penalize companies that outsource jobs. Protect markets just like our competitors do. Quit listening to Free Trade corporate economic traitors.

"Tax increases don't bother ANYTHING like the new entitlement spending does."

Calling it "entitlement spending" doesn't change the fact that health care reform is an attempt to end runaway health care industry inflation. If we don't get control of the costs we will bankrupt the whole country. We should be changing the system far more radically by putting everyone into Medicare but political realities make that impossible for now. I think it will become obvious that is our only real choice within a few short years.

""The question is, do people think we're tending to the things they care about?" said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.)."

He is one of the most progressive in the Senate and a big supporter of the Public Option.

Just wondering what brilliant ideas the right has to create more jobs.

Oh wait, I know, give rich folks more tax cuts. Sorry, just forgot for a moment.

"Why are they so paranoid when the elections didn't mean anything and per Pelosi--the Dems won!!"

How do you figure they are paranoid???
You just wish they were really all that worried.
This country isn't putting a Republican majority in Congress any time soon. Maybe never.

"And, fyi, Bush is gone. So stop blaming him, he has his share to atone for, but you libs gotta get off that one."

We'll quit blaming him when the effects of his presidency are less obvious. BTW, the famous CLINTON DEFLECTION went on for years.

"Who do you think opens business and creates jobs?"

Obviously not rich folks who got tax cuts. Seems a little odd that we had less unemployment problems when taxes were higher. Think maybe avoiding taxes is a reason to reinvest profits into a business???
It sure as hell was during the 50-70's.
I still remember owners of businesses saying that they were buying new equipment at the end of they year because it was better than giving the money to Uncle Sam.

"Typical bed wetter, all emotion, no sence."

When trying to say a person has no sense it helps to spell the word correctly. I'm not normally a spelling Nazi, but I am when it is an insult directed at me.

If you want to create jobs you first have to create demand for goods and services. Wages is what creates demand. Jobs create wages, whether those jobs be private sector jobs or government jobs. That is one area I think Obama is not doing the right thing, he should be creating jobs programs to get people working. If we are giving them unemployment checks anyway we could just pay them a little more and put them to work doing something. Then they would buy goods and services which would cause the private sector to start hiring again and push unemployment numbers down which would raise demand for labor which would increase wages which would create more demand......that's how we built the American middle class.

"Just a few years ago we had 4.4-4.5% unemployment."

We sure did, all paid for with credit based on home equity which suddenly evaporated. Wages were stagnant, people were employed but in low pay jobs that didn't earn enough to pay for the goods they were buying. That is not a sustainable economy and it finally collapsed.
I don't think it is rocket science to figure out that if you outsource jobs, import cheap labor, you are going to destroy the middle class.

" The free market has always worked when it allowed too."

No it never has. You can't give me a single example of when the "free market" ever really worked while we also had a middle class. It can't happen. The middle class was created by artificially manipulating the labor market to make labor more valuable. All of your arguments are just combinations of right wing talking points which have been thoroughly disproven with the collapse of Reaganomics.

"Half the crap we buy would be unaffordable if it were made here."

Not if we were paid enough money to make it.

"People made bad choices by running up their cc's, that happens every day."

That is probably true but it is also true that those "bad choices" were that great Bush economy we used to hear so much about. Without those "bad choices" we would have seen the recession we were really living in. Virtually no wealth was created during his entire presidency.

"If I can be made to believe that the primary purpose of the reform is to bring down overall cost to the economy (not just to poor families), I'd be for it."

That is a fair way of looking at it, I'll give you that. I think when you consider that everyone gets some health care when they need it even if that means emergency room visits, if you consider that preventive care is much cheaper in the long run than more intensive care for preventable disease, if you consider the huge amounts that goes to insurance companies who provide no real health care services....then reform become the cost container.
I'm not so sure this reform will do it though but I suspect it is just the beginning of a more extensive overhaul of our system, we can't afford not to overhaul it completely.

"The free market has always worked for the middle class when gov't in intervention is held in check."

You don't even know what a free market is. WE haven't had one in America in our entire history as a nation. We have always had regulated capitalism with regulation gradually increasing or decreasing in different eras. In the twentieth century, after regulation was greatly increased we finally built the middle class that we know today, it prospered for four decades until the era of deregulation began. For the next thirty years the middle class has seen jobs eliminated or outsourced creating less demand for their labor and thus stagnating wages. For a while we used credit from home equity to mask the economic plight of the middle class but with the burst of the housing bubble that mask was removed and we saw clearly that most Americans were living a life style they can no longer afford.
Reversing Reaganomics and returning to the Keynsian economics which built our Middle Class is our only real hope of returning to prosperity and at a time like this that means government creating demand for labor through jobs programs to kick start the economy by creating demand for goods and services.

"If 90% of the population of the US demonstrated against socialized medicine and other nonsensical liberal policies, they would _still_ just dismiss it as the work of a few right-wing extremists."

Utter nonsense. The majority supports health care reform and no imaginary 90% opposition exists now or ever will. Trust me, if 90% of the people demanded anything that thing would be done.

Yeah imaginary 90% protests prove something.
Hell why not make it 100%, when it is imaginary why not go all the way???