I woke up this morning with the news in my ear.

I heard that half the people in North Carolina don't believe Obama is an American and a majority of them don't know Hawaii is a state.

These are the same people who are crowding into the Town Hall fiascos yelling and shouting and never listening. They scream "Keep the government out of my Medicare." They yell "socialism" and then go to the V.A. for their blood pressure medicine.

And more frighteningly, they operate a 3-ton SUV at 70 miles per hour just a few feet from me, every goddam day.


These are the Christians, like the good woman here who is cleverly giving us all the finger, tee hee. I'd bet she doesn't know ABC is owned by the Disney Corporation.

And I'll lay good money that she doesn't know that these astro-turfed Town Hall disruptions are paid for and organized by GOP flacks, right wing PR firms and health insurance companies deathly afraid of losing their monopoly.

I would say they're stupid, but I know some of them and they're not stupid. They're ill-informed, manipulated, lied to and scared, but they're not stupid. And that makes it even worse.

Which leads me to Despair. Despair that nothing will be done to fix our broken health care system because while the GOP is really good at convincing people that Obama is going to kill your mama, that Mexicans are going to crowd you out of your doctor's waiting room and that your grandparents will face "death panels," they suck at actually coming up with anything more positive than stamping their feet and screaming "No!"

The death panel thing comes from the lovely Sarah Palin, who waved her Down's Syndrome baby around like the proverbial bloody shirt, exploiting that little kid again for political gain. Shameful.

Palin should take her own advice, honor the American soldier's sacrifice and stop making shit up.

But that's not going to happen. And that's why the word of the day, kids, is Despair. It's what's for dinner.

UPDATE: For a really great rant about Sarah's death panels, try this.

A sample:

"...You have no idea what it’s like to be called into a sterile conference room with a hospital administrator you’ve never met before and be told that your mother’s insurance policy will only pay for 30 days in ICU. You can't imagine what it's like to be advised that you need to “make some decisions,” like whether your mother should be released “HTD” which is hospital parlance for “home to die...”