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11月21日 Hurdles remain for new stem cell technique - Cloning and stem cells- msnbc.com
The original story in the Columbus Dispatch announcing this "breakthrough" got a banner headline. The original story on MSNBC had a banner headline. Now we find out that we are "years away" from solving the problems it creates before it can provide benefits. Where's the headline for the hurdles? 11月19日 When the Honeymoon is Over
It's customary to give the new president a brief honeymoon period. It's going to be really brief for the next president. How to un-do and re-do everything in the last eight years is an awesome task. Fire the ones who have been hired. Hire the ones who have been fired. Un-do and/or re-do all that has been done and done to us. Do all the things that have been left undone, and undo all the things that have been done.
11月18日 The Silence is Deafening
When the Cheney Gang and the Bush Bunch are finally gone on January 20, 2009, we hope, the books will start coming out on how bad things have been for the last eight years--the worst president and vice president in the history of the United States. If I were going to write one of these books, I'd make the title, "Absence of Agitation". What has been missing throughout the whole time has been people's protests, mass demonstrations, public outcries, cries of enough is enough. As bad as things are today, the silence from people is overwhelming and deafening.
11月16日 The Ladder of Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics -- Let Me Count the Waysby Patricia L Johnson and Richard E Walrath "On paper, it appears the Treasury Department has managed to analyze income mobility inside out and backwards to come to the conclusion the poor are jumping up the income quintile ladder by leaps and bounds, while the rich are losing ground." Click the following link to read complete article
Technorati tags: Income Mobility, U.S. Department of Treasury, WSJ, Median Income, CPI, Income Quintile, IRS, Warren Buffet, U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Inflation 11月13日 Muddled Mess
If we didn't have such a muddled mess in this country, the objective would be to provide health care to everybody. Then you wouldn't need health insurance or insurance companies, but we're too far in the hole to get out. Doing away with insurance companies altogether just won't fly. They have too much money to spend to defeat such a plan. Given a chance businesses would likely opt out of providing coverage to employees now because it costs so much. If it comes, when it comes, I think national health coverage will come fast. Something is going to happen to make health care an overwhelming urgency. It took the Great Depression to create Social Security. It will take another national emergency to get national health insurance. But I don't think it's too far away now. 11月12日 Breaking EvenListening to Nathan Dungan, founder and president of Share Save Spend®, makes me wonder if he has even the slightest idea of what he's talking about. Saving in this as well as every other country, as you might expect, is done by people who have money to save. If you're a member on "the lower end of the socio-economic" spectrum, you are going to have little, if any, money to save. The best you can hope to do is stay out of debt and break even, and that's going to be very hard to do.
11月11日 Happy Veterans Day from Articles and Answers
Please click on the following link: http://www.articlesandanswers.com/Veterans%20Day2008.htm
Technorati tags: Holidays, Veterans Day 11月8日 A Resounding Win for the People
The Score is in -
After seven years in office Congress finally said "NO" to President Bush and they said it loud and clear; with the House overriding the veto of H.R. 1495, Water Resources Development Act of 2007, with a vote of 361-54 and the Senate following with a 79-14 vote. Following are the names of the 34 Senate Republicans that stood up for what was right and and voted against the Presidents veto.
Sometimes it's difficult to do what's right when you're under a tremendous amount of political pressure, but these Senators stood up to the pressure and voted to override President Bush's veto. Job Well Done - THANK YOU! The following 12 Senate Republicans stood fast with President Bush and voted "NO" to the veto override.
We can only cross our fingers and hope that the next time around they see the light and realize there is safety in numbers. 11月6日 The Great American Social Security Bamboozle
By Richard E Walrath and Patricia L Johnson David Broder, who writes for the Washington Post, recently had a column about Social Security. If you can find it, it's worth a look--not for what it says, but for what it fails to say. As Broder gets older, he loses more and more of his marbles. "A Hearing the Candidates Should Attend" by David Broder is filled with everything anyone ever wanted to know, except the basic question - why. Why is the Social Security program in trouble? In the following statement Broder fails to provide a clear picture of the problem "unless ways are found to reform the financing and benefits of Social Security and Medicare, the demands imposed by the retirement of millions of baby boomers will consume the federal budget and blight the prospects of the next generations." We didn't just wake up one fine morning and say "Oops... there is no more money in the kitty" that's not how government works, so what went wrong, why is Social Security in trouble? The answer is Social Security isn't in trouble, Medicare is - and lumping Social Security and Medicare together is wrong, they are two separate programs. Social Security benefits are paid through payroll taxes. Employers and Employees each pay 6.2% of wages, up to a maximum (2008 will be $108,000), while self employed individuals pay 12.4%. In 2006, 84% of Social Security benefits came from payroll taxes, with 14% coming from interest earnings, and 2% from taxes on Social Security benefits. The 2007 OASDI Trustees Report states " Social Security's combined trust funds are projected to allow full payment of scheduled benefits until they become exhausted in 2041" The report continues "... financial adequacy of the program for the next 75 years could be restored if increases were made equivalent to increasing the Social Security payroll tax immediately and permanently from its current level of 12.4 percent (for employees and employers combined) to 14.35 percent." In other words, the Social Security deficit over a 75-year period is no more than 1.95 percent of taxable payroll wages, not exactly a financial crisis. Medicare presents a different problem. In 2008 the first 'baby boomer' becomes eligible for early Social Security benefits at age 62, she recently applied for benefits online, but her benefits do not actually begin until January of 2008. Three years later, at age 65, this person will become eligible for Medicare and over the next two decades 78 million more Americans will become eligible for Social Security and subsequent Medicare benefits. The problems facing Medicare are as follows:
During a CBS 60 Minutes interview , David M Walker, Comptroller General of the United States made the following statement about the 2003 Medicare prescription drug plan " The prescription drug bill was probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s," David Walker, as chief accountability officer of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) and former Public Trustee for Social Security and Medicare from 1990 to 1995, is definitely someone 'in the know' when it comes to the status of Social Security and Medicare. His following comment says all there is to say about the subject: "With one stroke of the pen, Walker says , the federal government increased existing Medicare obligations nearly 40 percent over the next 75 years." This administration did not err in providing prescription drug coverage to senior citizens and the disabled; their error was in not negotiating lower prescription and medical costs prior to implementing the program. The "plot" and that's the only way to describe it is to bamboozle people into believing there is a real problem with Social Security that requires reducing benefits to solve it. But, even more, the "plotters" want to get this done BEFORE the time comes when the Social Security pay-out is more than the pay-in. Why is this so important to the "plotters?" Three reasons:
Guess who the "plotters" are in this scheme of things? 11月4日 What Happens to Rudy?
Right now on the Republican side, Mitt Romney is way ahead in the Iowa polls while Rudy Giuliani is way out in front in national polls. What the media and the political pundits ought to be talking and writing about is the discrepancy between the two polls. Right after Iowa comes the NH primary. The winner in Iowa is going to get a boost going into the NH primary. What's going to happen to Rudy if he loses in both Iowa and NH? 11月3日 When There is Only One Source
If you live in Columbus, OH, you buy all your electricity from AEP. Why? There's nobody else selling it. So guess what? AEP is all for deregulation. Why? So they can bump up their prices. Funny thing, where there's competition, where consumers have different places to buy, you don't hear the power companies talking about the need for deregulation. They're happy as clams then with regulation, guaranteed rates, and, oh yes, subsidies would be just fine, too. When you hear the air filled with, "Let the market decide", you know business has the consumer by the throat. When the going gets tough and competition gets rough, you don't hear so much about "the market" from the power companies, or the utilities, in general, or Big Business.
Technorati tags: Columbus OH, AEP, deregulation, power companies, utilities, big business, competition, Richard Walrath Voluntary Recalls November 2007 - Check your Freezers
Only three (3) days into the month of November and already we've had two major food recalls on the books due to possible E. coli contamination, 1.1 million pounds of ground beef sold nationally under various brand names and 414,000 cases of pizza products sold by General Mills under the Totino and Jeno brand names. What's going on with our food chain? Have food processors become so lax in following safety standards that our food supplies are becoming contaminated or is there more to this story than meets the eye? Both recalls are classified as Class I ..."health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death." These recalls are being made due to USDA inspections finding E. coli in the products which seems odd. If the USDA finds evidence of a Class I risk to consumers, why aren't these recalls mandatory rather than voluntary? Seems like consumers should deserve mandatory recalls when E. coli is an extra added ingredient, not listed. Following are excerpts regarding the recalls and a listing of recalled products, for complete information on these recalls, please click the links that take you directly to the Cargill and General Mills Totino and Jeno sites.
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