Back to Basics

Jerry Cope

Designer, Filmmaker, Environmental Writer, Eco Activist

Even as BP and US government officials continue to declare the oil spill over at Mississippi Canyon 252 and the cleanup operation an unqualified success, for the first time blood tests on sickened humans have shown signs of exposure to high levels of toxic chemicals related to crude oil and dispersants. Some of the individuals tested have not been on the beaches, were not involved in any cleanup operations or in the Gulf water — they simply live along the Gulf Coast. Several of them are now leaving the area due to a combination of illness and economic hardship. As the media’s attention has moved on and the public interest wanes, the suffering and hardship for people along the entire Gulf Coast of the United States from Louisiana to Florida continues to worsen. While BP and the government are scaling back cleanup operations and distancing themselves from legal liability for the environmental destruction, economic hardship, sickness and death resulting from the largest environmental disaster in our nation’s history, the situation continues to deteriorate.

The use of the Corexit dispersant 9500 and the highly toxic 9527 by BP, with the approval and assistance of the US Coast Guard and EPA, has been the subject of intense scrutiny and criticism. Never before has such a huge quantity of the toxic compound been used anywhere on the planet. Most countries including NATO allies ban it’s use and will only grant approval as a last resort after other methods have failed. Britain has banned its use altogether. The NOAA provided extensive information summarizing other nation’s policies in regards to Corexit after Senator Barbara Mikulski demanded the information from EPA administrator Lisa Jackson during congressional hearings in July. While the dispersant serves to break down crude oil on the surface and thus makes the oil invisible from the air, it is highly toxic and bioaccumulates in the marine food chain. In humans it is a known carcinogen and its use was widely condemned after Exxon/Valdez and the horrifying health effects on the populations exposed to it there. As it evaporates and becomes airborne, the toxic compounds have moved on shore, creating health impacts that, although apparently large from the numbers of people affected, the full extent is unknown. BP and the US government have effectively been performing the largest chemical experiment in history on a civilian population without their knowledge or consent.

Dispersant and crude in Gulf

Within two days after arriving in the region in mid-July, everyone on our team began getting sick. After our first day out on the water with Captain Lori of Dolphin Queen Cruises touring the lagoons around Orange Beach, Alabama, we all had extreme headaches. During our boat tour, dispersant was visible covering the water everywhere. That evening I developed a gagging, coughing reflex that was so intense and persistent it was impossible to speak to my daughter on the phone. The symptoms typical for high levels of chemical exposure such as burning, itching eyes, constantly runny nose, chronic coughing, burning sore throat, chest congestion, and lethargy progressively intensified. Over the next several weeks these symptoms continued to worsen until I developed chemically-induced pneumonitis. Before leaving the area I had blood tests initiated to determine if the levels of exposure were high enough to be be detected. The musical activists Sassafrass and the tireless efforts of Michelle Nix allowed myself and several local residents to have blood drawn and tested by Metametrix for chemical exposure. Project Gulf Impact and the Coastal Heritage Society have also contributed greatly to air and water testing in the Gulf region affected by the spill. Project Gulf Impact has set up a dedicated medical help phone line at 504-814-0283. It has proven extremely difficult to find medical care providers who are willing to see patients who have been impacted by the oil spill due to the tremendous pressure exerted against hospitals, clinics, and physicians by BP. In numerous cases BP has provided financial payments to institutions and individuals in exchange for them agreeing not to allow their physicians or staff to see, advise, or treat anyone sickened as a result of the well blowout.

I spoke at length with Michael R. Harbut, MD, MPH, who is clinical professor of Internal Medicine and director of the Environmental Cancer Program at Wayne State University’s Karmanos Cancer Institute. Board Certified in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Harbut was Chair of the Occupational and Environmental Health Section of the American College of Chest Physicians, was Medical Coordinator of the Kibumbe Refugee Camp during the 1994 Civil War in Rwanda, where the death rate for patients under his care was 1/3 that of the remainder of the camp and was Chief US Medical Advisor to Poland’s Solidarity during the Cold War. His research has been published or presented in venues ranging from the New England Journal of Medicine to the White House.

JC: I wanted to speak with you and see what you thought of the test results we got back. As you know, some of the locals actually came back even higher than mine.

MH: First you have to remember the setting — this is New Orleans and the Gulf Coast; there is a history and a context in which things need to be placed. In my specialty, which is occupational and environmental medicine, there are not many of us who are board certified who actually take care of patients. The bulk of the physicians in our specialty are medical advisors or medical directors to large corporations, and many have never met a chemical they didn’t like. Sort of like Will Rogers. Part of the context is there is a physician whose name is Victor Alexander who was a specialist in my field. He worked in New Orleans at the Oxnar clinic and was seeing a lot of patients who worked for the petroleum companies and was reportedly fired for all of the work he did for his patients as opposed to the petroleum companies — what a doctor is supposed to do. So Victor Alexander then goes into private practice and the New Orleans police came and arrested him for robbing a bank.

JC: Seriously?

MH: Yea, it gets way crazier. This is a guy who was doing very well personally, economically — it came out in trial that he had a half a million dollars in the bank and was making plenty of money. It is unlikely in terms of motive that he would rob a bank for 2,500 dollars. The video from the bank was analyzed by the retired chief of criminal identification for the FBI; he said there was no way it could have been Dr. Alexander robbing this bank. He went to trial twice, the judge threw out a lot of evidence that would have exonerated him and he was sent to prison for robbing a bank. The Louisiana State Medical Society refused to take away his license. Many physicians who do work or potentially could do work or have knowledge of the area in New Orleans know the story about Victor Alexander. The message is quite clear: Don’t mess around with the petroleum industry.

JC: I have been working mainly in the Orange Beach/Gulf Shores area of Alabama, and that’s where I got sick.

MH: Have you had a CAT scan?

JC: Not yet, although they want to do one at the National Jewish Respiratory Center in Denver.

MH: You have to do that. I was chairman of the Occupational and Environmental medicine section of the American College of Chest Physicians so I have a lot of experience in this. You really need to be seen by a physician who understands this is serious.

JC: It’s on the schedule when I get back to Colorado. What do you see when you look at the test results from myself and the other people down here? What do they tell you?

MH: Let me tell you one more thing before I forget. I think that the only way to come close to getting the ultimate answer down there is to — there has to be a federal task force if you will. A federal effort where there would be half a dozen or a dozen specialists in this field who would have the protection of the government either temporary commissions from the U. S. public health service or something like that. Who would be responsible for organizing all the science and all the medicine and trying to get people to deliver care down there. I just don’t think you are going to get many volunteers unless they know they have the protection of the government. The annals of environmental diseases are strewn with stories about physicians who have had their lives ruined.

JC: The impacts of what is happening down here is are so big it’s very hard to wrap your head around it.

MH: I will give you one other example while we are talking about it. In the early 1990s I had called a bunch of cases, I saw patients who were sick from their environment who worked for Dow and DOW Chemical and a couple of the steel mills. In an eighteen month period I had one Blue Cross Blue Shield audit, two Medicare audits, a Michigan Employment Security Commission audit, a USAID Inspector General’s audit, and I was the target of a federal grand jury investigation. After two years and tens of thousands of dollars Medicare thanked me for teaching them how to catch a crook, apologized for bothering me — I told them how they could catch crooks and they thanked me. The US government, the local FBI office actually called my attorney and said they really weren’t able to find anything and my attorney who is a former US Attorney said that the government never calls when they have investigated somebody they just leave them dangling for the rest of their lives. The degree of harassment towards physicians is enormous, which I think is part of the reason — because of the conflicting forces at work in the Gulf, because of the probably less than half truths that are floating around that there needs to be a federal task force of independent physicians and scientists who have the protection and full faith of the United States. The way the system works, I think it would mean temporary commissions in the public health service. I don’t think even the oil companies that work down there would try and bump off a guy who works with the public health service.

JC: A number of people I have spoken to in Washington share that same opinion. Does it help to have test results in hand that show high levels of exposure from this event?

MH: I remember you had no Benzene but a lot of Hexane and a couple of Hexane metabolites. I am not sure what that means because where you see Hexane, Hexane causes what is called a dying back neuropathy, meaning the nerve cells in the arms and legs die back from the distal tips to the proximal end. You can end up with numbness, pain, all sorts of things. Hexane is a direct petroleum product so where you see Hexane you would expect to see Benzene. Now, that having been said I personally don’t even do actual solvent levels anymore because they are fraught with error. Rubbing alcohol is the prototypical solvent, and if you put a cap of rubbing alcohol on a flat surface like marble or something it’s usually gone before you would have a chance to get a paper towel it evaporates so quickly. So what happens with the organic solvents in general is that unless there is absolutely perfect control when they are drawn, there is a fair amount that will evaporate, if in fact not all of it. One of the dangers of people going to this lab (Metametrix), which I think is a good lab, is if they get the test drawn at a facility that lets it sit out for a little bit you are going to get a false negative result. In a case like yours, if you believe the sample is valid and it shows that you have Hexane and Hexane metabolites and also Octane in your blood, then it’s a pretty good clinical indication of how to go about treating you, which is usually just drinking a lot of water and then treating the end organ damage. End organ damage meaning we know if you inhale this stuff, if you have it in your system, it will damage your nerves. so we take a look at the nerves. The nerves will not show up abnormal on a test until there has been 30% damage. So what I do here and what I teach my residents is that for most people who come in to see the doctor in this field with a problem you will get more yield in terms of finding pathology and being able to help them if you look for end organ damage rather than the presence of a solvent because the solvent could have evaporated after it has already whacked the brain or whacked the liver.

JC: I spoke to the founder of Metametrix and he said that the tests were designed to pick up these compounds in the body after part of it, particularly Benzene, has been flushed. He indicated that the Benzene would not show up for very long once you were exposed but that the other compounds, the Ethylbenzene, m. p.-Xylene, the Hexane, which was way high, the Methylpentanes and the Isooctane, all of those things indicated to him that we were exposed to significant amounts of Benzene.

MH: That’s what I would think, too.

JC: When you look at these results is there reason to believe we might have sustained serious damage to our organs?

MH: In order to be scientific about this you have to have baseline data on a large population. What the oil company doctors, the professional experts that will ultimately be hired in these cases will argue is that you don’t know what background is in the area. I have seen them do this. They will go out and check 90 people and they will find people with results less than yours or more than yours and they will say this is background so with this particular patient you can not rely on the validity of the testing. On a scientific basis that’s true, I would prefer background. What happened to you right now is you have an indication that you breathed in harmful agents — you have a marker. They are called bio-markers. A bio-marker is the Hexane, N-Hexane and the Octane. You have evidence that you inhaled it because it’s in your blood. Nobody has correlated how much N-Hexane in your blood by PPM or PPB correlates with actual nerve damage. You need to have pulmonary tests, high resolution cat scans of your chest, liver function and cardiac function tests. What should happen with people with these exposures is at an absolute minimum, and I do not believe this is adequate, but at an absolute minimum the NIOSH recommended health monitoring tests should be done. Be certain to ask the doctor examining you if they have ever been paid or retained by a petroleum company or a chemical manufacturing company.

JC: I can do that.

When The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and all other media in America begin to devote lots of space and time to the subject of bed bugs, you know America has a real pest problem.

Uniquely, I know a lot of pest control professionals because I have worked closely with the industry for a quarter century providing public relations services.

So let me say that I have the ANSWER to the nation’s plague of bed bugs.

It’s called PESTICIDES.

Not just any pesticides, but specifically the ones that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has successfully banned or forced pesticide manufacturers to stop registering or manufacturing because of the cost involved.

The truth you will never read elsewhere is that there are pesticides that will rid the nation of this massive bed bug population explosion and they will do so rapidly. Can you imagine an end to the current bed bug infestations just about everywhere in say, a month?

The problem is that the pesticides I have in mind are not available because the EPA has removed them from use by either pest control professionals or consumers. Meanwhile, pest control professionals are doing everything they can with the methods available to them, all the time being called unreliable or worse. The options they have at their disposal are few and usually expensive.

Arizona vs. the U.N. human rights police
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010

An indignant President Obama complained last week, “I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead.” Fine. How about plastering a copy of his presidential oath of office there instead? The kowtowing commander-in-chief is in dire need of a daily reminder that his job is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” — not international law or global diktats.

Case in point: Last week, Obama’s State Department handed in America’s first-ever report to the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights in conjunction with something called the “Universal Periodic Review.” In short, the 29-page document (pdf) is a self-aggrandizing report card touting the administration’s far-left domestic and foreign policy initiatives for the world’s approval. The report boasts of racial- and gender-bean-counting in the executive branch; Justice Department outreach to Muslim grievance groups opposed to post-9/11 security measures; teachers’ union payoffs in the federal stimulus law; continuing commitment to closing the Gitmo detention facility for enemy combatants; and the illusory lifesaving effects of Obamacare on minorities through “expanding community health centers” (which have yet to be built, but not that it matters in our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president’s age of post-achievement).

The report also includes a section on “values and immigration,” which essentially singles out Arizona’s immigration enforcement law as a human rights deficiency “that is being addressed in a court action.”

In response, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer rightly blasted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration for succumbing to “internationalism run amok.” Brewer pointed out in a letter to Clinton, “Human rights as guaranteed by the United States and Arizona Constitutions are expressly protected in S.B. 1070 and defended vigorously by my Administration. In fact, the Department of Justice has correctly not included these so-called ‘human rights’ issues in the current litigation against the State of Arizona.” Somehow, that inconvenient detail escaped the Foggy Bottom bureaucrats’ notice.

No one should be surprised, of course, that the Department of Blame America First is prostrating itself before the likes of repressive U.N. Human Rights Council members Libya, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China. No one should be surprised that Obama’s globalist panderers couldn’t simply keep their mouths shut and refrain from trashing Americans with whom they disagree. In May, you’ll recall, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Michael Posner preemptively trashed our country’s human rights record to Chinese government officials and humiliated Arizonans — and all Americans — who support states’ rights to protect their borders and enhance their security through strict immigration enforcement. An obsequious Posner called S.B. 1070 “a troubling trend in our society” in his bow-and-scrape conversations with the ChiComs.

Grim reaper photoshop credit: Manly Rash

I said yesterday in my Beltway Chainsaw Massacre column that the GOP needs to track the Obama jobs death toll and tell the victims’ stories far and wide.

But there’s no need to wait for the GOP. I’ll keep doing it right here.

The first story of the day comes from the Fort Worth Star Telegram in Texas, where a health insurer called Health Markets has laid off 70 workers and expects up to 180 more as it braces for the costs of Obamacare and other government mandates:

HealthMarkets, the North Richland Hills-based seller of health insurance, laid off 70 employees this month and expects to trim 180 more positions by the end of the first quarter of 2011, according to a recent federal filing.

In the Securities and Exchange Commission filing, HealthMarkets blamed the layoffs on “dropping enrollment levels experienced by the company’s insurance subsidiaries,” along with national healthcare reform and “related legislative developments.”

HealthMarkets provides insurance plans to the self-employed, individuals and small businesses.

The second story of the day comes from the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts, where a local hospital will slash about 50 full-time jobs:

About 50 full-time jobs will be eliminated at the HealthAlliance Hospital — Leominster Campus, and one of two planned expansion projects may be cut back.

Mary Lourdes Burke, chief communications officer for the hospital, said yesterday the job cuts do not mean 50 layoffs, because some were vacant positions that will not be filled, and some were positions that had hours reduced. Also, she said, some union contracts required moving employees into other posts.

As promised this evening, I have brought forth a topic that I am a little excited to have some of you folks, who are so entrenched in your beliefs about regulation and government’s necessity in the realm of business, sink your teeth into and debate here at SUFA. I will allow the topic to rest on its own for two days until Tuesday night’s open mic (simply meaning I won’t be posting a new article on Monday night). I have spent the last couple of years debating with folks here and elsewhere that I believe that the market could take care of things better than the government. I don’t actually feel that there is any question as to the validity of that statement. The government hasn’t met a regulation that has worked. Sure some of them make small improvements in some areas, but the problem is that the unintended consequences seem to always negate any good that comes from regulation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world controlled by the Food and Drug Administration. Not only is regulation completely ineffective in that realm, but the unintended consequences are devastating to a society that has the potential to be much farther down the path of better health than the FDA has allowed.

So what I am going to offer here is my vision for the elimination of the Food and Drug Administration. I cannot claim that all of what I will say here is 100% mine. It is the result of reading many different ideas and having many different discussions with people over the years. I wish I could name every person who had a thought that contributed. Some of them are in books (John Stossel, Hayek, and Andrew Napolitano for example), while others I knew only as “that guy I talked to while waiting for the Metro in DC.” Now let me first address the concept that I am espousing here:

I fully understand that we cannot eliminate the FDA tomorrow and think that everything is going to magically transform and the private markets are going to have instant solutions. I also understand that the idea of doing so simply scares the poo out of anyone who still, in their own mind, cannot grasp the concept of a world without government regulation. That means that any proposal that would take this drastic step would be shouted down by the same type of people who sound the alarm that without government intervention the climate will change, Bill Gates will buy the Presidency, and Coca-Cola will go back to putting Cocaine in their soft drinks.

That is why what I offer is a two-step proposal. We will get to the two steps in a bit. Step two is actually quite simple. It is nothing more than eliminating the FDA. But in my opinion we have to do step one first. Before I get to explaining step one, I thought the first relevant thing to do was justify why this is necessary at all. I made the claim above that the FDA is the best example of how unintended consequences negate any good that comes from regulation. I am going to provide a few reasons why I believe this. It will be a sort of justification for the elimination of the FDA in the first place. After all, you don’t go changing things all willy-nilly. There has to be a need for changing things in order for the private market to take action. If a need doesn’t need to be filled, the private market doesn’t fill it. But there is plenty of need to eliminate the FDA.

The Food and Drug Administration was formed in 1906 by Teddy Roosevelt as part of the Food and Drug Act. Many of the regulatory powers associated today with the FDA were granted via the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Currently the FDA is responsible for “protecting and promoting public health through the regulation and supervision of food safety, tobacco products, dietary supplements, prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, blood transfusions, medical devices, electromagnetic radiation emitting devices, veterinary products, and cosmetics.” The agency was meant to do good. It was formed as it currently exists a result of some public outcry over interstate transportation of food that had been doctored and a 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent. See, even then progressives knew how to take advantage of a crisis.

Over the years the size and scope of the FDA did what every government bureaucracy does: grow out of control. Let’s start with the operating budget which taxpayers would no longer be responsible for. Last year’s operating budget for the FDA was 2.4 Billion dollars. That a nice chunk of change. But that is only a fraction of the actual costs to consumers. Drugs in the United States are some of the highest priced in the world. Financially strapped folks in the US break the law to get the same drugs for less money from foreign companies in Canada and Europe. I would suggest that simply lowering the costs of drugs would be reason enough to eliminate the FDA.

Henry I. Miller, a former FDA official, presented a crushing analysis of the FDA’s regulatory process and procedures. In his early 2001 editorial commentary, Dr. Miller noted that the total time it takes to develop a new drug and get it to market had doubled since the 60′s. He also noted, “Costs are spiraling out of control because the FDA meddles endlessly in clinical trials and keeps raising the bar for approval.” Furthermore, he cited statistics that showed the average number of clinical trials per average drug increased from 30 in the early 1980′s to 68 during the 1994–95 period while the average number of patients in clinical trials for each drug more than tripled! As expected, the average time required for clinical trials for a new drug rose from 85 months in the first half of the 1990′s to 92 months in the last half of the 1990′s. (found here )

University of Chicago Medical Center top executive Dr. Eric Whitaker is a busy, busy man.

Here’s a rundown of his schedule since his Chicago pal Barack Obama moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

*Golfed with Obama on his December 2008 Hawaii vacation;

*Played hoops with Obama during a three-day getaway to Chicago in February 2009;

*Attended the Obamas’ first state dinner in November 2009;

*Traveled with Obama to Norway in December 2009 for Nobel Peace Prize ceremony;

Loathsome cowboys

How’s that Summer of Recovery working out for you? Continuing my series on the White House War on the West, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s attack on the economy, and the White House land lock-up (Part 1, Part 2) and ocean grab, here is the latest on Barack Obama’s deliberate job destruction policies.

According to the WSJ, the administration forged ahead with its junk science deepwater drilling ban despite knowing it would cost 23,000 jobs.

Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Marcia McNutt, an Obama administration science adviser, commented on the corporate culture of BP in a memo sent to Michael Bromwich, the administration’s new top offshore oil exploration regulator, on June 28.

Critics of the moratorium, including Gulf Coast political figures and oil-industry leaders, have said it is crippling the region’s economy, and some have called on the administration to make public its economic analysis. A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects…

Sound familiar?

Just last month, you’ll recall, the TARP inspector general reported on how the capricious Dealeragate mandates of Obama’s non-expert auto experts deliberately destroyed jobs in the name of “shared sacrifice” to appease Big Labor.

Then there are more and more Obamacare job-killing stories piling up like this one:

Assurant Health is eliminating 130 jobs at its offices in Milwaukee and Plymouth, Minn., by Oct. 1 as the health insurer prepares for changes under federal health care reform.

“I think the media now has to…tell the American people who’s getting money for poisoning the millions of people in the Gulf.” – Hugh Kaufman, senior EPA analyst, admits millions have been poisoned in the Gulf states.

A biochemical bomb went off in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010—a bomb that was as dangerous and destructive as a nuclear blast.

An atom bomb’s death and destruction can be measured immediately after detonation while BP’s unintentional biochemical bomb is a slow-motion explosion that is driving a disaster that continues even now.

Lingering death, however, occurs with both types of explosions.

Millions exposed to uncontrolled hemorrhaging, lesions, cancers

Recently, enraged scientists have presented strong evidence that millions of Gulf area residents have been poisoned by the BP Gulf disaster. Worse, millions more could be exposed to long term poisoning from benzene contamination. Benzene exposure leads to cancers.

Yet other than those furious scientists few seemed to care.

After his endorsement of a mosque at Ground Zero created an awful kerfuffel that has Democrats racing for cover right before mid-term elections, President Obama has retreated behind the protective cover of the U.S. Constitution.

Barack Obama and the Constitution?

Is it not the highest form of blasphemy just to mention this president’s name in the same sentence as the U.S. Constitution?

After all, he has waged all-out war on that document since invading the Oval Office on January 20, 2009.

As reported at Yahoonews.com, in part:

“BOARD AIR FORCE ONE – A White House spokesman says politics wasn’t a factor in President Barack Obama’s remarks about building a mosque near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City.

Deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton said it was “not politics” but Obama’s feeling that he had the obligation as president to “make sure people are treated equally” under the Constitution.”

If Obama really gave a tinker’s dam about the Constitution, he would scrap his outrageous law suit against the state of Arizona for protecting its citizens from invaders.

He would move to scrap ObamaCare, which was rammed down the throats of unwilling Americans with legislative sleight of hands and bribery when the votes were not there to follow the rules.

There is going to be a shitstorm of outrage if Obama and his incompetent administration goes ahead with this rumored mortgage bailout of underwater loans. The liberal elite in Washington is simply doing whatever it wants without regard for the people. They are corrupt and will be happy to forgive portions of your neighbors loans in return for their votes.

Those of you who bought a house and used a large down payment will be screwed. Those of you who bought within your means will be screwed. Those of you who have not bought a house in the last 10 years or so will be screwed. Your kids are going to be paying for this their whole lives. Your grandchildren will be paying for this their whole lives. It is generational theft and is immoral. I am sorry your house is financially underwater. Are they going to extend the same courtesy to cars?

We are going into debt in huge amounts due to all of the so-called Democrats (read Socialists) spending sprees over the last 2 years. It is insane. To pay for all this my taxes will probably go up. I do not believe for a minute that making less than $250K will save me from a large tax burden. My health care benefits will most likely go up as well. I am F#$%@! sick of this. I sit here seething at what the government is doing to this country.

This mortgage bailout better not happen. It best stay a rumor. You think people were pissed about TARP, then health care? You ain’t seen nothing yet.