[Pollster1]

It’s no coincidence that numerous governors — not just Democrats like me but also Republicans like Jan Brewer of Arizona, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan — see the Affordable Care Act not as a referendum on President Obama but as a tool for historic change.

True. This has been a mostly free country for its entire history, with freedom steadily increasing until the last few years. ObamaCare is the key to changing that status and giving those in power greater control over the people they want to rule.

[Maceman]

This has been a mostly free country for its entire history, with freedom steadily increasing until the last few years.

I beg to differ. Freedom has steadily be DEcreasing over the past hundred years, starting with the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913. It's just that the encroachments on our liberties have gone into turbo drive in the last few years.

Now, we really can't say that we are a free country at all anymore. From the time I was a kid in the 1950s, and even into the 1990s, if somebody told you not to do something you wanted to do, a typical response was: "Hey -- it's a free country."

When was the last time you heard somebody say that? And even if you did, didn't it ring hollow?

We are no longer the United States of America. Now we are the Benighted States of America, and every day the last few vestiges of liberty that we still see are disappearing every day.