Having lived in Iowa for eight years I feel qualified to say that Grassley is a moron. This tool will twist and bend with the wind. He always struck me as a kind of Chauncey Gardiner character that could be manipulated by the rich and powerful in Iowa. I don't think he has original thoughts.

Altzheimers, obviously......get rid of the old coot. Or, he is just lying, in which case........get rid of the old coot.

sorry, this guy is obviously not ready for Prime Time. Pick some farm-kid-high-school-senior who was in the National Honor Society. You'll get BETTER representation in the Senate.

As soon as Alan Grayson gets the entire Military Industrial Complex defunded using the rushed through anti-ACORN bill, we will have more than enough cash to cover everyone on the planet.

A grave philosopher wrote a whole book a few years ago explicating the topic of BS, and its crucial distinction from lying, with which it is often confused. Both involve statemtns that aren't true, but while the liar knows the difference between the truth and falsehood, and chooses to tell a falsehood, the dispenser of BS doesn't care, systematically refuses, to distinguish between truth and falsehood.

Grassley is a BSer. He doesn't know enough about health care financing to be able to tell truth from falsehood in statements about health care financing. If he left it at that, he would just be ignorant, which is where most of us are about most things, everything about which we lack the often highly specialized knowledge you need to be able to distinguish true from false statements. But he feels the need to pretend to understand these issues, a need no doubt sharpened by the fact that his re-election campaigns are financed by people who have a very strong interest in certain versions of what is true and not true about health care financing gaining currency. So he takes direction from these people, which, again, is something we all do when we know nothing about a topic and have to seek expert advice. Who better to turn to, who would know better about health care financing, than the fine folks who have made billions at that racket?

Look, Grassly just says whatever these guys who own the insurance companies, who clearly are the experts in the field, tell him to say. That's his job! It's positively surreal that anyone would expect him to actually know enough to mean what he's saying, or be able to avoid contradictions when discussing these highly technical matters. Next you'll expect the guy to explain string theory to you without tripping up over the details! Cut a simple Midwestern farmboy some slack, willya!

If you want the folks who represent us to stop telling untruths, whether lies or BS, the first step is to quit expecting them to know things outside their field of expertise. The very worst effect of letting people get away with giving our legislators vast amounts of money, and it's not a bribe if only it's used for campaigning and not swimming pools or yachts, is nothing so crude as that said legislators are thereby bought and paid for. They take money from people they already agree with. The worst problem we create when we force our legislators to raise large amounts of money to get elected, is that we produce legislators whose area of expertise is fund-raising. If what you need to get good at to survive in Congress is fund-raising, and the voters don't care how much you know about health care financing, guess what? It won't be long before Congress is full of expert fund-raisers and devoid of people who understand health care. Should a question come up requiring actual knowledge of something other than fund-raising, these Congresscritters will latch onto the people who make lots of money at the area of expertise in question, because these people are already of their acquaintance from their day jobs as fund-raisers.

Which is all a round-about way of explaining that this circus won't end until and unless you, the voter, cut the BS. You don't have to be an expert, you just have to clear your mind, to understand that all those commercials you're seeing for candidates, in the place of actual common sense pronouncements about the issues, or some credentials proving some knowledge of the issues, prove exactly one thing, that the candidate doesn't understand jack about anything but how to get the rich to give him money. I have no idea what you think you've been gaining by continuing to vote for whichever of these goniffs has got the most commercials up on the air. Do you think that the fact that he has the most commercials proves that he's the most skillful and aggressive at taking money from other people, when he's supposed to work for you the people, and that proves that he must be some smart macher who'll be more able to lie, cheat and steal better on your behalf, for pork or whatever, than some hapless loser who isn't smart enough to be on the take? Quit BSing yourself. Stop it. Start voting against the people with any commercials, who do anything to get elected but talk to you, or have a record of actually knowing thngs that are important in determining public policy. If you can't do that, and yes there are obvious practical difficulties getting anything done as the only voter in the country who isn't BSing himself, then lay off poor Chuck Grassley, who's just working a simple grift to feed his family, no worse than the rest of us BSers.

See what a couple of million dollars buys you...

Chuck Grassley is a snake -- the epitome of the slimy politician who will say anything to avoid the heat. I would think he has zero credibility at this point.