Medicare's track record on controlling costs is pretty poor. In fact, there's a strong argument that the Medicare reimbursement system has driven health care inflation.

Private insurance reimbursement right down the codes is modeled on Medicare and its fee-for-service model. Fee-for-service encourages more treatment and more tests. Slashing reimbursements does not change the underlying incentives the system. It merely encourages doctors to move to more expensive or more frequent interventions to compensate for lost income.

Getting costs under control is a thorny problem since moving away from fee for service will result in rationing care at some level which is a political minefield. I'm not convinced that the cost problem and the coverage problem can be tackled in one go. The larger the bill, the bigger a target it is for misleading attack ads.

Sitting at your keyboard and whining that the House Democrats didn't deliver what you want rather than organizing an effort to call senators strikes me as petty and useless. You do deserve a civics lecture since you seem to have forgotten that the House bill is not the final bill and people who really care about the outcome would keep fighting rather than threatening to try to sink the ship.

If you can't even be bothered to try to pressure the existing majority party, good luck starting your own. It's a lot more work.

While I can't say anything about Rep. Grayson specifically, most members of Congress spend a significant portion of their time fund raising. And while every member of Congress will claim contributions do not influence their votes, nobody except the hopelessly naive believes that. Congressmen should be careful about calling people 'whores' since the look an awful like 'whores' themselves.

Violent offenders like Garrido should not be paroled. If he had been left to rot for his 50 years sentence for his earlier conviction, he would not have been able to kidnap again.

However, too many resources are spent fighting a pointless and failed drug war rather than protecting society from the truly dangerous.

One common sense reform would be for the police to *always* check parole status on complaints from neighbors and do mandatory property searches if the complaint is about someone on parole. If a search is too much effort, at least the complaints could have been forwarded to his parole officer who would have recognized there was a problem if reported that there were young girls living there.

It's absurd to equate bailouts for home owners with cancer research. Public health is public good, everyone benefits. All gains from home ownership are private. Home ownership is heavily subsidized already by the tax code.

All this concern about economic damage from declining prices should have been expressed when home prices were rising quickly. That was the time to do something about it. Instead, many home owners were too busy using their houses as ATMs. It's not possible to artificially support asset prices in a market as big as real estate.

If there's one lesson everyone should know about investments, it is that is an investment can rise 20% a year it can also fall just as fast.

I do not ask for bailout if my stock investments suffer. Why should housing be different?

Whether the home owners were prudent or not, why should I bail them out? Those home owners were not going to share their gains with me if their homes appreciated. Most home gains are tax free. I already subsidize home owners because I pay a much high effective tax rate because home owners get to deduct their mortgage interest.

More bailouts and subsidies will keep prices unnaturally high and make it impossible for me to ever buy something in my high cost area.

Owning property is RISKY. Even after this bubble, there's still this idea in the American psyche that home ownership should be low risk. It's not and never will be. If we want it to be, the government needs to regulate prices either directly or indirectly. However, doing so would create a whole host of other problems.

Even if everything the officer said is true, he could have diffused the situation by leaving. Regardless of the race issue, arresting a 58 year old professor who walks with a cane for disorderly conduct is stupid. No prosecutor is going to take this to trial and even if the prosecutor is does no jury is going to convict him. All this arrest accomplished is the officer flexing his power.

The police chief's stalwart backing of the officer shows that he believes if the police make an error and accusing some one of breaking into their own home is an error, they shouldn't apologize for it.

Only government workers can get with making an error with very prominent person and get way with still insisting they are right.

The 1950's were anomaly when it comes to the rise of the middle class. American manufacturing was so strong because the industrial capacity of the rest of world had been mostly ravaged by WWII while the US's had dramatically expanded to support the war effort.

What possible economic rational is there for a non-college educated worker to live at standard of living many times above the rest of the world today with full economic security? Manufacturing has moved out of the US because it's cheaper to do it elsewhere. It's not an inherently high wage industry because training requirements are relatively low to compared to a job that needs a post-graduate degree.

The other way to realize the 1950's were economically an anomaly is to look for example where something similar has elsewhere in history. They are few and far between.