There is no 28th amendment to the United States Constitution.

Julianna, I've just started a project to do just that. It's called the Reading Habits of Fictional Characters and right now I'm asking bloggers to use the Mr. Linky on my blog to link to instances of reading that they encounter in their own reading and mention on their blogs. (Or, you could mention it in the comments if you don't have a blog.) A little later in the year I'll use the information in the links to start a wiki and at that point everyone will be able to add directly to it. Hope you'll participate!

That's my daughter. Just this year she's been back to Germany, spent five weeks in New Zealand and Australia, and will spend a month backbacking in India starting the day after Thanksgiving. When are you going to grad school? I keep asking.

CB is quite good at working to find a host family the exchange student will be happy with. Kids who want to change families are able to do so.

My daughter went to Germany through the Congress-Bundestag program. It was a wonderful experience for her and we enjoyed going over at the end of the year to meet her host family and to travel through Europe. She still keeps in touch with her family and many of the friends she made and has gone back to Germany a couple of times since. She went the year after she graduated from high school. I think the older kids fared better emotionally than the younger ones, plus she'd already been accepted to college and found it easy to have her scholarship deferred, so she didn't have to stress over credits transferring or what not. Plus, no one forces the kids to stay the entire year. There were kids who came back early for a variety of reasons.

No, Elaine, you have a tendency to direct your post to the group and tell them you have me on ignore. But as long as we're communicating with one another directly, have you read page 429?

It's interesting how someone supposedly reading the bill for herself will find the need to copy and paste scary stuff found on blogs and twitter as if these were her own personally drawn conclusions. But I guess that's one way to get around board rules.

Then what you heard had without a doubt been edited down to render it misleading. I linked to the transcript earlier today, but that post was removed. Google "ABC health forum obama" and you'll pull up a link to the complete transcript. Info you want is on the third page.

Page 16 defines the term "Grandfathered Health Insurance Coverage." Grandfathered coverage is mentioned again in Sec. 102, Sec. 202, and Sec. 401. In fact, in Sec. 401, seven types of acceptable health insurance coverage are described, including grandfathered coverage AND QUALIFIED HEALTH BENEFITS PLAN COVERAGE- Coverage under a qualified health benefits plan (as defined in section 100© of the America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009). (You can google that Act and read it, if you're worried over what the word "qualifed" means. The bill's 1,000 pages plus, though.)

No, he didn't. Someone edited down a reference he was making to his own grandmother, who was dying of cancer when she broke her hip and for whom there were concerns that she might not survive the surgery if she had it, to make it appear on the youtube clip that he was talking about the woman with the pacemaker.

Journalistic style has nothing to do with how a writer, editor or publication feels about a particular policy or politician.

You don't have to read the entire bill. Just do a word search.

Might I suggest that everyone pull up the actual bill from the Library of Congress website and do an actual search for the info that various people here and in the media have claimed is contained within the bill? I find no mention of any "end of life" counseling, no mention that everyone will be switched over to the government plan within x-number of years instead of allowing them to have private insurance or to change their private insurance.

I won't get a chance to start reading the bill myself till late afternoon, but according to this, that claim is being made by people who haven't actually read the bill. We were paying 20 percent of our income to health care (with a $5,000 deductible per person) before my husband lost his job the end of May; I'm not going to shed any tears at the prospect of only having to pay 2.5 percent at some point in the future.

Oh cool. I love that book. I'm happy to hear a book club's reading an early Tyler instead of just the recent ones.