Another way to "take back the country"

THIS MAY SHOCK some of you, but there are moments when I find myself in partial accord with the teabaggers when they wave their signs and shout that they want their country back (from you-know-who). I, too, want my country back, not from you-know-who but rather from the congressmen who run their offices 24/7 as a federal depository for health care industry cash. It is running into the millions these days, and like that robber Willie Sutton, who found banks to be his most rewarding nest eggs of choice, the Hill people in Congress take the lobbyists' money because it is there.

So those Republicans (who are being served well in the Senate by some Democratic colleagues) who are in for the long haul to defeat reform have good reason to keep stalling. Can you imagine the hit their daily cash flow would take if they were no longer useful to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry? The K Street handouts have become so scandalously common that you have to wonder why the pols can't be a little less conspicuous about their consumption. Maybe a ham for Christmas and round-trip airfare to the world's most fashionable golf courses. They aren't the worst abuses on the planet and a little R&R for our hard-working public servants might do them and the country some good.

These guys even raised hell about mammograms , which they would never equate with prostate cancer exams! When Sen. Barbara Mikulski's amendment expanding preventive health care for women went to a vote, it passed easily with only 3 Rrepublicans crossing the aisle to support the measure. Two thirds of the Republican yeas were women, Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins. Do you think the lords of their manor will try to explain that one at their next women's auxiliary speech ? It was left to Mikulski to set the whole issue into the working context. She said, ever so incisively: "For many insurance companies simply being a woman is a pre-existing condition." I wish I had said that.