Since everyone now has to have some insurance, including healthy young people who would otherwise ignore it till they wound up in the emergency room at taxpayers' expense, the insurance companies are indeed making money on Obamacare. That, plus hatred of higher taxes, is precisely why the "single-payer option" (i.e., complete federal funding through annual taxes) went nowhere.

What the TP really hates about O-care is that the feds are behind it (they hate and fear Washington), and they claim that it's "socialism" which is about the dirtiest word in American politics other than "liberalism," which the GOP has carefully crafted into a precise synonym (except that "liberalism" more overtly includes the hated and feared gay rights). "Socialism" in this case means that the richer you are, the more you'll be hit with "confiscatory taxes." The TP is revolted by this idea because some of them are rich, those that aren't think they will be or should be, and they think that poor people are poor because they're shiftless and immoral and don't deserve "taxpayer dollars" that just encourage them to have more "welfare kids."

Did anyone notice that the TP managed to cut back the Food Stamp program some weeks ago in the name of "economy"? Meanwhile inefficient waste and the notoriously bloated defense spending roar right ahead.

Many TP people believe that one day the UN will invade America on some trumped-up pretext (I am serious), and since we'll have to fight the Russians and Chinese and Cubans and Mexicans and probably everyone else at that point, we can never have enough weapons.

In the '60s they were a handful of kooks calling themselves the John Birch Society. Now there are millions of them, and they don't give damn about anyone else.

Former (conservative) GOP Congressman Vin Weber was on CNN this morning to say that the TP doesn't want to fund the Federal government *ever,* "because they actually hate government." They don't want a Federal government for anything but defense, law enforcement, and regulation of interstate commerce. Then they'll be "free" to be "decent and God-fearing."

The TP rank and file are ignorant, provincial, willful, fundamentalist, bigoted, arrogant, clannish idiots who are proud to be these things because it's "just common sense." They don't believe in majority rule, because "you do not compromise your principles."

They're an angry, uneducated minority, pandered to and egged on by slightly smarter opportunists in and out of office.

To keep sane, you can tell yourself, "Obama got more votes. Obama got more votes. Obama got more votes."