OK, whats the biggest waste of money, besides taxes? Not my mortgage. Yes, I could buy a seven bedroom mansion on five acres in most other places for what I pay for this drafty shack with a slab foundation thats crumbling like a saltine cracker but I kinda like the old dump. Food? No way, I'm a savage eater. Gasoline for my fifteen year old 200k+ mileage car? Uh-uh. The biggest waste of money, besides taxes is, of course, insurance.

Now its not as bad as it used to be. The day after my then 16 year old son got his license and I saw the car that I love redlining away from my house in a squeal of spinning tires and a cloud of acrid rubber smoke driven by a person who had had their license for one hour we received a friendly letter from the insurance company informing us that they had moved the decimal point of our car insurance bill one place to the right. You could hardly blame them. Being in the car with the kid at the wheel meant either the flesh on your face was pulled back like an astronaut doing G-force training in a centrifuge or that the only thing preventing you from hitting the dash or being propelled though the windshield was the seat belt, which would catch and partially strangle you as the irresistible force of negative gravity pulled you forward. Somehow the kid never got a ticket or had an accident.

Three children just about drained a lifetime of income from my pockets, especially after our little ballerina was let loose on the highways to play bumper-cars with my VW Cabrio. She piloted that hunk of German engineering like an Me 262. Talk about Farfegnugen. She would roar down Montana Avenue in Santa Monica with the top down and a screaming gang of her fellow ballerinas heading for Starbucks, cheating arrest, death and disaster on every block.

But they've all grown and pay their own insurance now. Our empty-nest old-fokes bill is back to being a minor annoyance, one of life's little financial hemorrhoids. Sometimes annoying but never really that painful. But even if its not such a big worry insurance is hard to forget. Turn on your TV, you cant avoid it.

There's the ditzy dark-haired, apple-cheeked hussy with the tight white outfit and the bright-red lipstick, looking like a vampire who just bit somebody, waving her 'price gun' at all the sundry morons who, for some reason, are wandering through the totally white insurance store. That company is called Progressive. Sorry baby, you're kinda hot but there's something about that name that just doesnt work for me.

Then there's the one where the guy who used to play the President on 24 tells you how safe you'll be in the good hands of Allstate. All-State. First we have Progressive now we have All State, as if there's not enough State in our lives these days. Sorry former TV President, no sale.

But one of the most obnoxious ones doesnt just have one theme that they push. You know who I'm talking about. They have a Cockney-accented lizard, a guy with a Rod Serling voice making really bad jokes, talking potholes and that absolutely bizarre series of ads about a cave-man offended because they say its so easy a caveman could do it. These ads are so ubiquitous you'd almost think these guys were running an Indian casino or a public employee union or something. Their rates must be astronomical for them to be able to buy all this expensive air time. They're like the girl you went out with once and didnt get along with but who kept phoning every fifteen minutes. Desperate.

But I guess if you really want to talk about insurance and desperate in the same sentence you'd have to talk about that tall skinny guy who currently plays the role of President on TV. Boy is he on TV. Even the Indian Casinos and the Fraternal Order Of Police cant outdo this dude when it comes to airtime. He wants everybody to have his insurance and he doesnt mind telling you what he thinks about those other insurance companies, either. They're killing people, letting them writhe in pain and all kinds of stuff like that. Him and his friends got up one day for a six-hour marathon and I'll tell you, by the time it was over the whole front of my Grateful Dead t-shirt was wet with tears.

They told a story about a poor old lady who had to use her dead sister's false teeth every time she tucked into a meal because of those danged insurance companies. It reminded me of WC Fields who had a toothless dwarf valet named Shorty. Fields bought a set of dentures which he let Shorty use until he got mad at him. Then he would confiscate Shorty's choppers and drag him to an expensive restaurant and order them both Porterhouse steaks. I'm surprised that the Demos didnt use this story because unlike the old lady using her dead sister's teeth and Tom Harkin's campaign manager's brother's medical problems the story about Fields and Shorty is actually true. I'm glad they didnt use the Fields story. I was already worried that all my salty tears were going to make the ink on Jerry Garcia's face run onto Bob Weir's guitar and thinking about poor Shorty gumming that unforgiving beef while WC chortled and tossed back another straight gin would have made me cry so hard even Bill Kreutzman, whose face was right near my armpit, would have been in danger of getting drowned.

But what makes me cry even more is the thought that we have a President who is more stupid and obnoxious than a green computer-animated lizard. Yes, the Geico Gecko might crap up the space between sequences of 'Project Runway' and stick his limey nose into exciting episodes of 'Battleplan' or 'Locked Up Abroad' but President Barry has something that separates him from all those other pitchmen. The IRS.

You can decide not to go with the Cockney lizard or decline to throw away your life savings at the San Miguel Indian Casino but there is no escape from Obamacare. The steely talons of the State will reach into your pockets and bankrupt your employer, they will force you and your children to buy an expensive insurance policy for all the DINKS and gay boys who didnt feel like having any children and lived high on the hog while you were stripped of every penny by the little tykes who appeared in your life. You'll be dunned to give Cadillac care to one tenth of the population of Mexico who currently reside in our beloved country. In fact, in a cost cutting measure, the Obamunists are considering opening free medical care offices inside Mexico itself. Rents are much cheaper and as we all know, the more people we add to the free medical care rolls the lower the cost goes.

Thats the quality of thinking that comes from our Presidential Reptile and his snake-like buddies. And compared to that other cold-blooded, tiny-brained saurian this President is all over the tube pushing an inferior insurance that practically everyone has rejected but which it seems we will be purchasing whether we like it or not. Yes, I know, we have a 2 trillion dollar deficit and revenues are starting to tank but puh-leez, that leak is in a different part of the boat. Our President Gekko is on the tube surrounded by extras in white lab coats so often that you expect a grim voiceover after every appearance to warn you of the potential side-effects of Obamacare.

"May cause lingering poverty, long wait times for urgently needed care, retiring physicians, forced participation in abortions and economic collapse. In the event of a life-threating condition try to consult one of the few remaining doctors. Use with extreme caution."

So, with the Floppy-Eared Lizard's schtick becoming more tired than that stupid 'Waltons saying goodnight' joke, more obnoxious than the offended cave-man, more egregious than the wiggling bint with the Progressive price-gun and with his poll numbers tanking faster than the numbers on the screen in the Walmart ads and with every independent in the country aligning with the Tea Partiers in boiling rage against the Stalinist commies who are trying to nationalize one sixth of our economy using a parliamentary trick and then charge us to subsidize every worthless layabout and scofflaw foreigner in the nation you'd think that there would be some voice of sanity in the Demo Party, some tiny voice that screams about political survival in a 17% unemployment environment.

It just goes to show that no amount of TV will sell a product known to be inferior. They've been flogging the Health Care mule mercilessly for a year and a half and he still wont get over the ridge. The bungling, confused pace of this outrageous piece of legislation has highlighted what species of incompetent, arrogant, self-serving totalitarian reptiles comprise the left-wing Demo Party and now the top leadership of our nation. It would serve us well to remember the extinction of the dinosaurs, a variety of cold-blooded but not very bright critters who ignored reality and wandered into the swamp, never to be seen again. One look at our Saurus Presidentialis and his pathetic performance will tell you that our impending national extinction isnt a theory, its settled science.