Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Dylan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin...that'd be my list.

Reagan has to be the most overrated individual ever. Just his aged face and his sharpened smile make me want to take a mallet to him (were he alive). Bush...I'm not going to dignify that inclusion with a response. Whoever said the American people need some real heroes was dead on.

Sweedman...you don't want to pay a dime so poor children can be educated? You think they should be uneducated because of their parents' unsuccessful lifestyle? I see your points about how government seems to be getting more and more invasive, but really, socialistic Finland or Sweden are far more livable than the U.S. It's not about collectivization or the Party or something else reminiscient of the Soviet Union in the '30s...the kneejerk reactions really must be kept to a minimum. In Sweden the people tend to prosper instead of the CEOs, and you don't see many ghettos.