What could have been described as the day of bad speech hell, the political stage yesterday offered long winded rants, economic ignorance, ill informed Senators, sleeping on the job, and a recommendation for those who can not afford health care that will not be winning any humanitarian awards any time soon.

On the health care reform front, the debate taking place on Capitol Hill yesterday that went late into the night, has proven to be a bit of an embarrassment for more than a few of Washington's “finest”. Starting with the Republican Senator from Kentucky, Jim Bunning, who decided that he was going to fight hard to keep the American people from getting health care coverage by... falling asleep on the job, literally.

But it wasn't just the Republicans that seemed to be having a bad day. Next up, we have Senator Kent Conrad who bumbled an attempt to discredit state sponsored universal health care and showed his utter lack of knowledge in the foreign relations department when he stated that “...in many countries they have universal coverage. They contain costs effectively. They have high-quality outcomes, in fact higher than ours. They're not government-run systems in Germany, in Japan, in Switzerland, in France, in Belgium -- all of them contain costs, have universal coverage, have very high quality care and yet are not government-run systems.”

Some how the esteemed Senator seems to have overlooked the fact that most of those nations have a tremendous amount of government involvement and in some cases, such as France and Japan, the state provides universal health care coverage directly for its citizens. That sounds like a “government-run system” to me. So we see how successful a government ran system can be and that is why we should not have it? What was his point again?

But even this display of ignorance in the workings of foreign nations can not top the most absurd statement of the day that came from Republican Representative Eric Cantor. When asked by a citizen what his solution would be for a dear relative who desperately needed surgery to remove some tumors but had no insurance, his response was to sell her house and everything she owned until she was poor enough to qualify for Medicaid and if that did not work she could try begging for some charitable organizations to try and get the surgery that she would need to save her life.

All in all, I think this shows the Republican conservative lack of compassion. As some have commented, their basic view is that if you can not afford it then you simply do not deserve it and that holds true even for the very basics of survival including health care in their world view.

At the end of the day a casual observer has to be seriously worried about those in leadership positions, particularly in the Republican party. And I do not know about you, but personally the thought of a world ran by Eric Cantor and Sarah Palin scares the living daylights out of me. It is now just a matter of “wait and see” to see whether or not President Obama can push past this rhetoric and callousness of his opponents and get this country going in the right direction although I am not yet confident in the government's ability to finally do the right thing and provide true universal health care coverage for every single citizen