State fines agents in investment scam. The World newspaper provides local and regional news coverage for Coos Bay, Bandon, Reedsport and other southern oregon cities.

Under the House plan, we will gamble as we choose a plan, decide which corporation will be the best for us, hoping we pick one that is not dominated by corporate bureaucrats focused on rationing care to maximize their profits. Imagine real reform, as simple as adding people ages 55 to 65 years old to Medicare in 2010, 35-55 in 2011, and so on until everyone is included by 2013. If the Democrats can't stand up to insurance companies now, it will be even harder in the future when they have billions in more profits from Americans forced to buy their product.

This weekend, a group of male pro-life Democrats gambled with women's health, and women lost. By broadly writing in that insurers can chose whether or not to cover "abortion services," pro-life amendments don't just affect their intended victims -- women seeking a way out of an unwanted or medically harmful pregnancy. They also affect another group of victims -- women whose pregnancies have already ended but have not yet miscarried. I'm one of those women, and this past Halloween I had what the hospital officially termed an "abortion." Hospitals and doctors in general do not have terminology to classify a difference between the termination of a live pregnancy and one in which the fetus has already died. To them, a D&C is a D&C, regardless of the state of the "conception materials" removed. Regardless of how many times I made sure to mention to the staff, either for the sake of my sanity or to spare me some sort of imagined shame, that I was ridding myself of my "dead fetus," to them, it was all the same.

Dennis Kucinich on the Ed Show and Greta's show.

I'd say voting for HR 3962 was better than the alternative -- up until this weekend, at least. I probably would have held my nose and followed the cue of Pelosi. That is, until she sold herself, myself and every other civil rights-minded woman in the country down the river with the Stupak Amendment. As I pointed out last week, the House bill already compromised the hell out of women's reproductive rights with the Capps Amendment. The Capps Amendment effectively cemented the Hyde Amendment, a 30-year-old measure the National Organization for Women (NOW) terms "abusive." The Capps Amendment forced the exchange to contain at least one private insurance option that specifically excluded abortion services as well another which expressly included it, in every market. But House Democrats allowed groups from the religious right to shamefully spin the Capps compromise into an abortion mandate by lying about it.

"Nowhere in the civilized world could one imagine civic leaders fear mongering the populace about the evils of “socialized medicine” without getting laughed out of the country. Unfortunately, these goons of capitalist oppression seem to have been collectively laughed out of the civilized world and into Land of the Free."

Congressman Kucninich, as we've come to expect, hits the nail on the head about the current health care reform debacle.