JohnSmith2007

But on the other hand, even if someone doesn't put the effort into improving their lives, they are still going to be there. What would you do with them?

Give them the minimum to maintain life and opportunities to improve themselves. Offer subsidized education and jobs skills training. If they don't avail themselves of those opportunities then let them live on their own devises.

Convert their body into fuel. Use their skin for lampshades and their fat for soap.

Your attitude of others with different opinions make you a real pig.

Washington Times is owned and operated by a bonafide nut - Reverend Moon. Do you want me to give you a background on his lunacy?

Huffington is a real nut herself. What is your point? How much input does Moon have on the day to day running of the Times?

It should be a goal no?

If you don't want people relying on social programs to make ends meet, then they need jobs that can pay enough to live off of?

A goal yes, granted by government decree, no. A person gets a good job at a living wage through hard work and a continuing program of self improvement. If someone does not put out the effort then they have no right to a comfortable life.

I don't I'm qualified to have an opinion about a book I've never read, but I'm still confused by what you define as Socialism, particularly in regards to the OP. For example do you consider Canada a socialist country?

Why are you leading the conversation from the point I made? How is it OK for you to post from a far left blog by a far left author and it isn't OK for me to post from a right leaning source without getting laughed at?

What do you mean by Socialist? That word gets thrown around a lot around here, but the meaning seems a bit allusive.

So you don't think that someone that writes a book whose title says we have a "right" to a job at a "living wage" isn't socialist? While I would like to see everyone to earn a good living calling it a "right" insinuates that the government should grant that right. That is very much a socialistic POV.

Call me puffy, but opinions from actual constitutional scholars hold more weight for me than bloated celebrities who have a natural flare for being drama queens.

Ah, I get it. I get laughed at for posting a story from a right leaning publication and you discount the story out of hand for it but you can post something from a extreme far left blog by a hard lefty and it is OK? Right. Tell me, if your author writes a book like this does it lend to his credibility?

Quigley is the author of Ending Poverty As We Know It: Guaranteeing A Right to A Job At A Living Wage (Temple University Press, 2003)

Sounds a bit socialist doesn't it?

Huff and puff post? Talk about zero credibility!

The new federal health-care law has raised the stakes for hospitals and schools already scrambling to train more doctors.

Experts warn there won't be enough doctors to treat the millions of people newly insured under the law. At current graduation and training rates, the nation could face a shortage of as many as 150,000 doctors in the next 15 years, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

That shortfall is predicted despite a push by teaching hospitals and medical schools to boost the number of U.S. doctors, which now totals about 954,000.

The greatest demand will be for primary-care physicians. These general practitioners, internists, family physicians and pediatricians will have a larger role under the new law, coordinating care for each patient.

The U.S. has 352,908 primary-care doctors now, and the college association estimates that 45,000 more will be needed by 2020. But the number of medical-school students entering family medicine fell more than a quarter between 2002 and 2007.

A shortage of primary-care and other physicians could mean more-limited access to health care and longer wait times for patients.

Proponents of the new health-care law say it does attempt to address the physician shortage. The law offers sweeteners to encourage more people to enter medical professions, and a 10% Medicare pay boost for primary-care doctors.

Meanwhile, a number of new medical schools have opened around the country recently. As of last October, four new medical schools enrolled a total of about 190 students, and 12 medical schools raised the enrollment of first-year students by a total of 150 slots, according to the AAMC. Some 18,000 students entered U.S. medical schools in the fall of 2009, the AAMC says.

But medical colleges and hospitals warn that these efforts will hit a big bottleneck: There is a shortage of medical resident positions. The residency is the minimum three-year period when medical-school graduates train in hospitals and clinics.

There are about 110,000 resident positions in the U.S., according to the AAMC. Teaching hospitals rely heavily on Medicare funding to pay for these slots. In 1997, Congress imposed a cap on funding for medical residencies, which hospitals say has increasingly hurt their ability to expand the number of positions.

Medicare pays $9.1 billion a year to teaching hospitals, which goes toward resident salaries and direct teaching costs, as well as the higher operating costs associated with teaching hospitals, which tend to see the sickest and most costly patients.

Doctors' groups and medical schools had hoped that the new health-care law, passed in March, would increase the number of funded residency slots, but such a provision didn't make it into the final bill.

"It will probably take 10 years to even make a dent into the number of doctors that we need out there," said Atul Grover, the AAMC's chief advocacy officer.

While doctors trained in other countries could theoretically help the primary-care shortage, they hit the same bottleneck with resident slots, because they must still complete a U.S. residency in order to get a license to practice medicine independently in the U.S. In the 2010 class of residents, some 13% of slots are filled by non-U.S. citizens who completed medical school outside the U.S.

One provision in the law attempts to address residencies. Since some residency slots go unfilled each year, the law will pool the funding for unused slots and redistribute it to other institutions, with the majority of these slots going to primary-care or general-surgery residencies. The slot redistribution, in effect, will create additional residencies, because previously unfilled positions will now be used, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Some efforts by educators are focused on boosting the number of primary-care doctors. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences anticipates the state will need 350 more primary-care doctors in the next five years. So it raised its class size by 24 students last year, beyond the 150 previous annual admissions.

In addition, the university opened a satellite medical campus in Fayetteville to give six third-year students additional clinical-training opportunities, said Richard Wheeler, executive associate dean for academic affairs. The school asks students to commit to entering rural medicine, and the school has 73 people in the program.

"We've tried to make sure the attitude of students going into primary care has changed," said Dr. Wheeler. "To make sure primary care is a respected specialty to go into."

Montefiore Medical Center, the university hospital for Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, has 1,220 residency slots. Since the 1970s, Montefiore has encouraged residents to work a few days a week in community clinics in New York's Bronx borough, where about 64 Montefiore residents a year care for pregnant women, deliver children and provide vaccines. There has been a slight increase in the number of residents who ask to join the program, said Peter Selwyn, chairman of Montefiore's department of family and social medicine.

One is Justin Sanders, a 2007 graduate of the University of Vermont College of Medicine who is a second-year resident at Montefiore. In recent weeks, he has been caring for children he helped deliver. He said more doctors are needed in his area, but acknowledged that "primary-care residencies are not in the sexier end. A lot of these [specialty] fields are a lot sexier to students with high debt burdens."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304506904575180331528424238.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

As with anything someone can make a buck over this is no different. Trading in something we want to reduce or eliminate to "save the planet" is a sure way to have it forever.

Australian firm linked to PNG's $100m carbon trading scandal

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/australian-firm-linked-to-pngs-100m-carbon-trading-scandal-20090903-fa2y.html

Indians make cool £300m in carbon farce

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1687531.ece

"Recycled" carbon credit scandal sparks price slumpPrice collapses to €1 as previously surrendered CERs surface on European exchange

http://www.businessgreen.com/business-green/news/2259761/recycled-carbon-credit-scandal

No, it does not sound fishy to me, nor does it sound like a Ponzi scheme. It also apparently seems perfectly legitimate to themember firms of the CCX who are trading in a currently voluntary (yet legally binding) exchange . You know - some little no-name companies you've probably never heard of like Ford Motor, DuPont, Dow Corning, Sony Electronics, Cargill and Monsanto. The concept is to efficiently exchange what you want with what the other guy has, or vice versa. It's the same basic dynamic that works in any market. It works for things as diverse as interest rate spreads and index future options, and it works for emissions too. This isn't theory - this is practice. These firms are active participants along with the traders, speculators and hedgers every single day. What C/T legislation would do is to make the system mandatory rather than voluntary. That will deepen the liquidity, no doubt, but it's not needed to justify the basic concept that an emissions exchange can work.

Sorry, not buying it. If the goal is to reduce something don't enable people to make money on it. When you do they will find a way to continue to make money on it.

I may get the 16GB version, it's cheap enough where if it sucks aѕѕ it'll just go onto my pile of "lightly used" devices and get forgotten quickly.

No doubt its a cool device but revolutionary? Not quite.

I'm gonna go buy an iPad and if it sucks I'm gonna have someone take it to Cali for me and hit Steven (lightly, don't wanna hurt him) on the head with it!

It's an iPhone with a bigger screen and without the actual phone

In reality it is the same as my sons new iPod Touch, just bigger.

I'm not sure if you were old enough to remember when the computer mouse finally was accepted by pc users, but their initial reaction to Apple's Mac with it's mouse was eerily similar. The mouse didn't actually do much of anything on the computer you couldn't do with a conventional keyboard. PC purists scoffed at the idea as fluffy nonsense, yet the mouse became standard on all pc's as Microsoft beefed up their OS. Intuitiveness, ease of use are major factors in driving the computer market. Steve Jobs knows that - he's a master at it. Like his other strokes of genius, the iPad is another brilliant marketing move for Jobs.

Trust me, I am a lot older than you. I remember the mouse when it first came out. You don't seem to understand. Touch screens have been around for a very long time. I can go to Best Buy right now and buy a PC touch screen computer and never need a mouse. This is nothing new, it isn't revolutionary and it isn't going to change the way we use computers. This is nothing more than an overgrown iPhone. Sure we will at some point get away from the mouse, this isn't the breakthrough device to do it. It is old hat and a gimick.

We had an Amana Microwave back in the 70's with a touch screen interface. Are they comparatively the same? Nope. It's the interface and OS that make the iPad very attractive for most computer users on the go.

If you think this is the way to go then go for it! I have a betamax machine for sale if you want one.

I'm not a politician or an economist either. I think you're right about one thing - Keynesian policies are far from ideal, and many real families throughout America are feeling the pain of joblessness as a result. Where I diverge from you, is what is the alternative? Is the alternative to do nothing (or less)? To stimulate less? To increase unemployment benefits less than we are? To provide fewer tax credits to small business? Again -- you seem to want to have government DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING. Understandable. But then when they do it, you criticize and say "It's not working. Do something different." Also understandable. The problem is - what else would you have them do? The alternative to something , at least according to the official Opposition, aka the "Party of No", is to do nothing. What we need are targeted smart stimulus programs that make efficient use of our (borrowed!) dollars to get people working. And we also need the understanding and patience of the people to understand that there are no miracle cures, and there's no way we're going to add the 8million jobs we lost in the next year or two. That's a fact, no matter which political party is in charge, or which policies they pursue. The choice is not between good and bad. It's been terrible and godawful-we-cant-even-bear-to-think-of-it. Right now, we're on track with terrible.

As to your comments regarding Wall St. and your healthy fear of it. Also very understandable. When it comes to the big banks - I completely agree. Morgan, Goldman, UBS, Citi -- they all ought to be ashamed of themselves.

As to the markets - I believe in markets. I believe in our equity markets, in our fixed income markets, and in our futures and options markets. I believe that given a chance, we can have a successful and vibrant emissions trading market too. Forty years ago if you had asked if we could electronically trade a cash-settled index futures product, very few would have said yes. Today - it's the bedrock of our capitalism. I believe in regulated, centrally-cleared markets and I think they can be an important (partial) remedy to the over-the-counter unregulated exchange in CDS derivatives that caused so much harm.

In short - when you say "Wall St." I think you mean the banks. Not the markets. There's a tendency by many to obscure the two. They're very different creatures.

Like I said, I am no expert so all I can go by is who is getting results. I have this innate fear when we borrow and print trillions of dollars to bail out and to stimulate and after a year we are no better. Maybe nothing is better than this.At least we wouldn't have all this extra debt on top of the debt Bush gave us. It looks like it is worse than nothing, but that is just my observation.

Emissions trading, come on now. Trading the right to pollute? Making money on the transactions? Tell me that doesn't sound fishy to you? If CO2 is a pollutant then regulate it. Don't go selling credits so you can make money on someone elses polution. That seems like a huge ponzie deal to me. If the goal is to reduce CO2 then just reduce it, stop with the monkey business. This all smacks of the sin tax on cigarettes to fund childrens health care. The goal can't be to get people to quit, if they did then who will fund the health care? The goal is to make a self sustaining source of income. That sounds very hypocritical to me. I see carbon credits as the very same thing, a sin tax on energy to make income for paper pushers and the government.

#2 - I hear lots of words, but it seems you want it both ways. Which is it: Government should take an active role in the marketplace to foster employment, or should it stay out of the way and let the private sector do its thing? It seems like you want them to do something, but then when they do it (Stimulus bill, tax cuts, etc.) you have the usual ill defined complaints of "So far I have seen very little...". If they do much - they get attacked for being activist and "wasteful". If they do little, they "just don't care". Damned if you do, damned if you don't. Thank goodness they're not listening to you for advice.

#3. Those paper pushers as you put it are breadwinners and taxpayers and homeowners too, propping up their local economies with retail sales, property taxes, etc. (I'm one of them). America's capital markets are a key driver of our prosperity and standard of living. You can rail against Wall St. all you like, but without efficient markets this country would look like Afghanistan. Besides - I beg to differ about what an Energy bill could mean for blue collar Main St jobs. You don't have to even go to the "Green technology" jobs, if you're not into that. Obama is proposing opening up drilling off the Atlantic coast and Gulf of Mexico, that's potentially thousands of jobs in the neighboring states.

#4 With expectations like that, you can't help but be impressed by what your Congressman is doing for you lately. Cynicism is easy. Doing something is harder.

I am not a politician or an economist so if you are expecting me to come up with a better solution then you are out of luck. All I know is that real unemployment is at around 20% and every economist from both sides of the isle are saying we will have this for the long haul. It doesn't seem to me that the Kensian way of economic stimulus is working very well.

Yeah, the paper pushers need to support their families also but Wall Street had a very big hand in the mess we are in now. It will be a long time before I trust any of them again.

Expectations are made from past performance. With piss poor performance come low expectations.

1. From the OP: The chief piece of legislation will be a jobs bill, a priority that many Democrats want to pass with unemployment and the economy remaining top concerns of voters. In fact, the jobs push will be a series of bills consisting of small business tax incentives and loan and access-to-capitol programs.

2. I thought all the free market critics are all about "government doesn't create jobs, only the private sector creates jobs". Now you do want to government to legislate and spend our way to employment gains? How wonderfully Keynesian of you. Welcome aboard.

3. Who's to say that an Energy bill isn't job-stimulative? I know of a bunch of market makers on the CCX who are thrilled at the thought of increased trading volumes and the clerks and traders that will be hired if c/t becomes law. Those are real honest to goodness jobs being created.

4. Since when are our expectations of government reduced to getting a single thing done at a time? Surely with 500+ House members and 100 Senators plus aides on the payroll, we can manage to get some multitasking out of DC?

To item #2: the only jobs the government can create are govenment jobs. They can create conditions that favor job creation through tax reduction and subsidies though. They also control the money supply which has in idirect effect on jobs. So far I have seen very little in the way of creating conditions favorible to job creation.

To item #3 The paper pushers on Wall Street may be happy but main street will not see any joy from the Energy Bill, at least not for some time to come.

To item #4: Given the performance over the last year I doubt if they can do one thing at a time, let alone multi-task.

Amen to that.

To bad Washington wasted an entire year. The dems would be looking at increasing their majorities if they managed to get unemployment down to 6 or 7%. Sure they have a bad health care bill, but that is all they will get. The shift back to the rep side will be sisemic this november.

See - the iPad is already changing computing.

I hate to tell you this but touch screen computers have been around for years. All the IPad did was put one on instead of a mouse. Nothing new there really.

Her claim isn't being denied. She was taken off of Medicaid because her income level exceeded the maximum. There must be some way to look into rectifying the situation given her medical condition. I don't think Medicare should be able remove people if their income increases beyond the qualifying amount without certain conditions - that the individual has medical insurance available through their employer or can be privately purchased.

Well OK, they did what the Health Care Reform was supposed to stop the private insurance companies from doing. This doesn't bode well if the "fix" was to add 30 million to Medicare and Medicade. Looks like we traded a privately run problem into a government run problem.

This is a problem that already existed with the system. But for every story like this, you can find 5 stories of private companies dropping people because they were no longer profitable.

That isn't entirely true. Medicare denies more claims than private insurance does. Look at page 5 metric 12 of this AMA report.

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/368/reportcard.pdf

Medicaid Drops Coverage For Mom With Cancer

FORT LAUDERDALE (CBS4) ―

Diana Smith has gone through six months of radiation and chemotherapy -- one week out of every month. She is in remission and had a donor for a transplant; being in remission is prerequisite for the transplant.

But her hopes of receiving the transplant were dashed in March, when she says, the Social Security Administration contacted her –without her soliciting it -- and told her that her three year-old son was entitled to receive Social Security disability payments. Even though she didn't ask for it, she signed the form and received her son's first check check.

In April, Medicaid canceled her universal health care policy because her income level had risen with her son's payments – making her ineligible for the insurance program.

The problem is Jackson Memorial Hospital cannot provide the procedure because the risk is too high. The universal policy from Medicaid helps shield the hospital from liability in this kind of case. Without it, they are subject to liability issues.

Even though Smith offered to cancel her son's disability benefits, she was told it's too late.

"She's gone through six months worth of radiation and chemo, her body can't take anymore. If they don't allow her to have this transplant coming up right now next week, they're in effect signing her death warrant," said her friend Tom Noonan.

"I want to live to see my son grow up and get on with my life," Smith told CBS4's Ted Scouten.

As a result of the WFOR CBS 4 report, State Sen. Dave Aronberg is prepared to take action over the weekend. Social Security officials are also looking into the case to make the surgery happen on Tuesday as had been planned.

http://cbs4.com/health/Diana.Smith.Woman.2.1623788.html

These geniuses actually called it WePad? The only "killer" is going to be

Apple's upcoming lawsuit.

These guys don't get it. The iPad is popular precisely *because* it's

NOT like a PC. If you make it more like a PC, you'll get all the

problems of PCs - viruses, spyware, malware, incompatible applications

and versions, etc etc.

And how is $600 for a 16GB version "a bargain compared with the iPad"?

This isn't "really" like a PC either since it doesn't run windows. It will be just as immune to the downfalls of windows as the Apple OS's are, maybe less so.

The WePad is powered by an Intel chip and relies on a Linux software basis which is compatible with Google's Android and all Flash applications, Ankershoffen said.

We should either do it or not do it. If we decide to win in Afganistan then we should give it everything we have and while not going out of our way to hurt civilians not handcuff ourselves either. Barring that we should just get out and at most take out Taliban and Al-Quida sites from the air. We have wasted enough blood and treasure there. I am sick of all sides running both wars as political chess games.

What in your opinion would be real health care reform, John?

The mess we got isn't going to help. IMO it will make things worse. Some aspects are good like the pre-exsisting conditions but most of the rest is just a sell out to the insurance companies. I have always been opposed to single payer but I am starting to rethink that position. I just don't have a lot of faith in the government to pull it off. Medicare is bankrupt and we just added 30 million people to it without any real cost control. The only outcomes I can see is a reduction in care or a huge increase in premiums. The government just doesn't have a very good track record with such things.