If everyone with a conflict of interest in healthcare had to recuse themselves, no quorum.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

especially once you factor out campaign contributions, spousal salaries, BOD directorships, family ties to industry, stocks held, junkets, and the like. The one thing the Founding Fathers did not foresee was widespread and accepted systemic graft and corruption or they would have made term limits a part of the Constitution. Even term limits do not protect the electorate from a short and concerted smash and grab effort to enrich and protect certain industries.

The answer has to lie in meaningful campaign finance reforms, but who would think the crooks will regulate their own gravy train?

I'm starting to think that the ONLY thing that could save us as a country is a RICO suit directed at Congress by some brave-but-terminally-ill-orphan-with-no-other-family United States Attorney, but then you would have to place trust in an equally politicized and untrustworthy justice system.

I'm starting to understand George Carlin's viewpoint a whole lot better. Sorry. In real life, my friends and family chastise me for being a Pollyanna type with an unrealistic optimism - almost Ann Frankish in believing that despite everything, people are mostly good. My belief system is really crumbling and my faith in being well-served by politicians is completely gone.

I think I'll take a break. Garden, read, pet my cats, cook, go to movies, take care of my family as best I can, and just stop being a disappointed little cog. If a had to write a book right now, that's what I would call it - The Memoirs of a Disappointed Little Cog.

[DJ13]

1. he ONLY thing that could save us as a country is a RICO suit directed at Congress

....by some brave-but-terminally-ill-orphan-with-no-other-family United States Attorney


And Spitzer was just the guy who would have done that had he not been driven out of office.

He would have been a natural choice to head the DOJ instead of Holder.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

2. I know. I really thought Elliot Spitzer was Teddy Roosevelt incarnate.