Just how far "back" do these people want to go?

A series of stories I've run across over the last couple of days has me wondering just how far "back" some of these conservatives want to take us. For example:

The worst outbreak of TB in Florida in 20 years.

The CDC officer had a serious warning for Florida health officials in April: A tuberculosis outbreak in Jacksonville was one of the worst his group had investigated in 20 years. Linked to 13 deaths and 99 illnesses, including six children, it would require concerted action to stop.

That report had been penned on April 5, exactly nine days after Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed the bill that shrank the Department of Health and required the closure of the A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana, where tough tuberculosis cases have been treated for more than 60 years.

In Appalachia, black lung is back.

Throughout the coalfields of Appalachia, in small community clinics and in government labs, it has become clear: Black lung is back.

The disease's resurgence represents a failure to deliver on a 40-year-old pledge to miners in which few are blameless, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and NPR has found. The system for monitoring dust levels is tailor-made for cheating, and mining companies haven’t been shy about doing so. Meanwhile, regulators often have neglected to enforce even these porous rules. Again and again, attempts at reform have failed.

Romney's BFF Ted Nugent is thinking we might be better off if the South had won the Civil War.

And of course, according to Rep. Allen West, then we wouldn't be saddled with the "slavery" of Social Security. The real deal would suffice.

I'm sure that by now you've seen the remarks made by Romney donors at the gathering on the Hamptons. But doesn't this woman seem to not only be insulting us peons, but suggesting maybe we should re-think the whole thing about giving us the vote?

A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. "I don't think the common person is getting it," she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. "Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

"We've got the message," she added. "But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies -- everybody who's got the right to vote -- they don't understand what's going on. I just think if you're lower income -- one, you're not as educated, two, they don't understand how it works, they don't understand how the systems work, they don't understand the impact."

I'd just like to go on record that whatever it is these people are pinning for, it has absolutely NO relation to the America I envision. And no matter what kind of high-minded rhetoric Romney might use, it is these people/policies that will be affirmed if Republicans win this November.

That's our choice. Do we want to go that far backward? Or do we want to go...