Via another commentary site:

Has is way, we will have time to travel, just not the funds. Now that he has his ObamaCare, next to be fallen by his mighty ax is the Shuttle Program. TX still have cessation from the US? I know Gov. Perry there & 11 other Governors are planning on trying to prove that he broke the law. In my opinion he broke the law by never producing a certified birth certificate. Guess he won't be driving in FL after 2012 because they require your birth certificate to get a license, even to renew it. XOXOXO

The people that sent us this email live in Titusville FL, just across the bay from the Shuttle Launch Facility. They may be connected to the shuttle program (although as you can see, the email makes no mention of any connection, so this is a total guess on my part).
The first thing you have to do with one of these emails is a lot of head-scratching...after doing that for a while, this is what I wrote as a response.

Ok..where to begin...
1. The reality is that the Shuttle program has been a technological partial success, but a total financial failure. The original cost projections were for $25m a mission, 4 orbiters capable of 150 missions and a launch a month. The final cost per launch (even when adjusted for inflation) is many times that, the turnaround period is closer to 4 months per orbiter, and the remaining orbiters have not even gotten to 100 missions. The Shuttle could not compete with commercial satellite launch services (one of its original objectives), and so all of the costs fell straight off of NASA (read: taxpayers) bottom line. Worse, 2 orbiters have been lost due to poor governance by NASA, which they tried to cover up in both cases. Richard Feynman's account of his time on the Challenger Shuttle inquiry panel is worth reading, it shows how flawed the whole decision-making process and risk assessment process was for the Shuttle program. He also explains that the reliability issues for the shuttle stem from the fact that it was conceived as a political, not an engineering project. NASA needed something to do after Apollo. Frankly I am surprised that the program has lasted so long. As Burt Rutan has showed, you can do sub-orbital exploration for a modest sum of money if you do not have a quasi-government entity running it. I'm not pretending that anybody can build a re-usable space vehicle for modest sums. The sheer oomph required to get into orbit will always make that an expensive undertaking. However, the Shuttle technology is 40 years old, and we could probably do a lot better if we start over at a future date.
2. The idea that the individual states can refuse to implement the HCR legislation is an interesting one but one that has a flimsy legal basis. The commerce clause in the Constitution has never been interpreted to deny the validity of legislation properly passed by Congress that does not fall foul of other constitutional provisions. It is my belief that the resistance to the enactment of HCR will last until the GOP starts getting electorally hammered by voters denied the benefits of HCR, or people begin leaving those states, whichever comes first. If Texas tries to delay the implementation of HCR, I will leave the state. There is an enormous amount of big talk coming from the GOP about repealing HCR and resisting its implementation, but my reading of the legal blogs shows that most of that resistance has little in the way of a substantive legal basis.
Despite the jolly bloviations of Gov. Perry, Texas will not secede from the Union. A buffer country with Mexico, with 4800 miles of borders, deprived of all US defense support, forced to carry a pro rata share of $12t in debt...how is a country like that going to survive? Let's get real.
3. Barack Obama applied to run for the Senate, which requires evidence of citizenship. He applied to run for President, which also requires evidence of citizenship. He was sworn in (twice!) by the chief Justice of the USA. Prior to that he was democratically elected as President, and none of the opponents tried to claim that he was ineligible. In this kind of situation, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the burden of proof rests with people claiming that he is not a natural-born citizen. To date, nobody has produced any substantive evidence. Every single document produced that purports to show that he is not a natural-born citizen has been shown to be an inept forgery. Worse still, many of the people claiming that he is not a natural-born citizen cannot even read the law. Anybody born in the United States is by definition a natural-born citizen. It does not matter where their parents came from. President Obama does have a birth certificate. It has been certified by state authorities in Hawaii, where he was born. Nobody has proved that the certificate is a forgery. Quite honestly, this is a BS wild goose chase being pursued by people who believe that Barack Obama is not a legitimate president. I would be more impressed if people simply admitted that, instead of continuing to tilt at windmills. Watch for the martyrdom of Orly Taitz, who has already been fined $20k for wasting the court system's time by providing legal arguments that, according to lawyers whose blogs I read, are so idiotic that a first year law student would be bounced from college for writing them.
(deep breath) I have received more than one comment in the last 48 hours to the effect that the passage of HCR (your use of the word "Obamacare" is merely the repetition of a rhetorical cheap shot, a slogan in lieu of an argument) is the end of Civilization As We Know It. It is not. The USA spends 14% (at least) of GDP on healthcare, and has worse metrics than many other countries, including Canada (which, the last time I looked, had a government-funded healthcare service). The US has the best healthcare technology in the world, but one look at the cost and the metrics shows that the delivery mechanism is dysfunctional. If you are happy with a country with at least (conservative estimate here) 30 million uninsured (including Mary, who is unemployed and cannot really afford to get sick right now), then you are really saying that you are OK with the USA having the sort of levels of coverage more normally associated with a Third World country. For crying out loud, Costa Rica, where Rush Limbaugh claimed he might go to live if HCR passed, even has a government sponsored healthcare system...I don't know about you, but I think the country I live in should have slightly higher aspirations...
We have a problem right now in this country, when elected representatives are recieving death threats and the FBI is having to warn bloggers and Twitter users that threatening the life of the President may be a felony. Quite simply, a lot of people have become way too overheated and need to cool down. I lost several friends after 9/11 because I refused to buy into the knee-jerk reactions that prevailed at the time along the lines of "bomb everybody who disagrees with us". I am seeing similar sentiments being expressed by opponents of HCR. It is not pretty, and it does not fit my definition of American behaviour. I expect to lose some Facebook friends over this, but I will not back down. A lot of the current apocalyptic yelling and screaming I am reading is not rooted in reality. HCR is not the end of the world. I was more worried by the wholesale abrogation of Constitutional rights post-9/11. Those rights are still abridged via the PATRIOT Act, but I see little interest in that from many of the people going into low earth orbit over HCR. As a libertarian, I regard those kinds of issues as far more dangerous to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Even better...I had my citizenship interview this morning in Dallas, and I shall shortly be sworn in as a citizen, after which time I will have the vote, and can really start causing trouble...

Later!

If the people that I sent this to follow the standard pattern of other people whose emails I have comprehensively replied to, I will not hear from them again. Somehow people who write rants like this react badly to being forced to confront facts and evidence presented as arguments. As we can see, authoritarians who were hoping for the failure of Congress to pass a health care reform bill are really really upset that one has been passed, and the amount of hyperbolic rhetoric out there is mind-boggling. If I believed a fraction of it, I would be buying seed, stocking up on guns and ammo and hunkering down for the arrival of the Socialist Thought Police. Cognitive dissonance is a painful thing to behold and have to deal with, which is where a lot of people currently seem to be.