"Hold the dark holiday in your palms,

Bite it, swallow it, and survive,

Come out the far black tunnel of El Dia de Muerte

And be glad, oh so glad you are ... alive!"

From "The Halloween Tree" by Ray Bradbury

In my backyard, my Halloween tree, a double maple, glows like fire at peak color. The snarling pumpkin on the front-porch rail and the Greek evil eye hanging in the window protect my home from evil spirits on the night they roam the earth, searching for souls.

Yes, I am safe inside; but I see the dark things huddled in my front yard beneath the evergreen trees.

There's the Vampire Letstax, whom I interviewed in October 1994 during the state graduated income tax campaign. His admission on tape that he needed the "grad tax" in order to suck lots more Massachusetts taxpayer blood, helped us defeat that ballot question; but he is back now with a liberal group that calls itself "One." It will take them four years to get their grad-tax proposal on the ballot again, so in the meantime they will settle for an income tax rate increase if they can get the bloodsuckers on Beacon Hill to help them prick your neck.

Standing with Letstax is a rather pleasant-looking Devil; they are using some taxpayer blood to toast this year's sales-tax hike and making plans for a gas-tax increase soon. There's another vampire with them: Ah yes, Count Barackula, his cape wrapped around his BarackulaCare proposal.

I shudder. During a recent news conference, Count Barackula attacked the Medicare Preferred programs, making it clear he wanted to kill them. And just last week, I got a notice in the mail from Tufts informing me that my Medicare Preferred plan will no longer be offered after Dec. 31; I and thousands of other Massachusetts seniors must find another Medicare supplement plan before the end of the year.

Will Barackula kill them all, and eventually force seniors and younger folks together into "the public option"?

There they are, in my front yard: Nancy Belagosi and a Hairy creature, waiting to control our health care system. They feed not on blood, but on power. Beware them!

Speaking of drunk on power, there's Barney Frankenstein, the monster that helped bring down the national economy with his support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and his resistance to mortgage reforms until it was too late. For some reason that achievement made him a major player in government bailouts intended to address the mess that he helped create, adding even more to the national debt. Now as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, he is raising huge amounts of money from those who, understandably, fear him, which he will funnel into congressional campaigns to elect other monsters next year.

There must be a Republican out there in the yard somewhere. Ah, yes, Dick Lon Cheney, annoying Count Barackula with demands to quickly take the country farther down yet another long dark tunnel of war. He refers to "taking time to make wise decisions" as dithering, because what is the military-industrial complex without young bodies to sacrifice on the altar of futile nation-building?

Oh no, and there go the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate: Martha Croakley, Michael Capghoulano, and two others I get mixed up, though one is a rich liberal and one is a community activist.

Croakley was one of the district attorneys who persecuted the innocent Amirault family in a rerun of the Salem witchcraft trials that was the Malden day care scare. Anyone who can't tell the difference between good people and evil ones shouldn't be hanging out in the U.S. Senate. I'll be voting in the Democratic primary, but I wouldn't vote for her if she was the last politician on earth.

Capghoulano is an old friend, honest and real; I worked with him when he was chief of staff to the House Taxation Committee in the '80s. Unfortunately, he was a supporter of the grad tax and now supports single-payer health care; I might trust him on Afghanistan though. In the end, I'll be voting for Scott Brown in the general election because he's not a blood-sucking liberal.

What's that in the shadows behind the lilac bush? It looks like a pig, but must be the H1N1 virus.

We were told, almost hysterically, by the government that we must get vaccinated against it, must vaccinate our kids, ASAP! Now we learn that there's not enough vaccine anyhow, so maybe we can wait and learn more about the virus before we panic.

None of the scary creatures in my yard seem to know what to do with the little swine; but most of them think they and the government can run the entire health system.

These are the vampires, monsters and hairy creatures who want to be in charge of our health care. If that's what lies at the end of the tunnel, we really might not survive.

ÔÇ°ÔÇ°ÔÇ°

Barbara Anderson is executive director of Citizens for Limited Taxation and a regular Forum columnist.