I think healthcare is a mixed bag.

On one hand, lots of people want it and need it, but on the other hand it is very expensive and fewer people can afford it. Lots of people who have lost jobs cannot afford to continue their medical insurance under COBRA.

Some of these people might qualify for Medicaid, but anyone who treats a Medicaid patient must agree to accept whatever Medicaid allows as full payment, and that usually isn't much. If your practice treats too many Medicaid patients, it will likely have financial problems.

IMO, we can't call healthcare a promising field until figure out how we're going to pay for it.

... a plausible explanation of where the jobs are going to come from in the hoped-for recovery.

I know from personal experience that many of the lost jobs have been sent overseas and are unlikely to return in the foreseeable future (if ever). Service sector jobs won't come back until people have money to spend on services. Construction jobs won't come back until people/companies start buying buildings and work through the backlog of unsold properties.

Can anyone make a believable guess about which sector of our economy will start hiring again and what circumstances will lead to this?

I for one would love to see how much money he contributed to politicians while he was stealing all he could stuff in his pockets.

In light of the news we are discussing, I can offer a partial answer: Not enough.

If he is, then you gotta admit he looks really good for his age.

Jeezus. Can't you see that I'm only pointing out that the news we're discussing isn't quite as good as it sounds? (not that it's all that good anyway).

The simple fact is that the government chooses to report a number that is less pessimistic (collecting unemployment), rather than the more useful (and more pessimistic) total of people unemployed.

The number being reported as "good news" is the count of people collecting unemployment, which does decrease when peoples' unemployment insurance runs out.

Until today. For the first time in 18 weeks, the total number of people collecting unemployment fell by 15,000, to 6,735,000.

Some people have been out of work for so long that their unemployment benefits have run out. According to our wonderful government, they're not "unemployed" anymore. Of course, they're still not employed, so I guess that makes them nobodies.

What does that make me?

Sounds like a typical New York City resident.

He seems obsessed with the idea of destroying parks and other green spaces to build many units of inexpensive housing. Few of the prospective locations are near likely employers or public transportation, so an additional bad side effect will be the creation of a lot more traffic. We'll also end up with a lot less space that might be converted to agriculture in the event of an oil crisis, and a lot more people to feed with the limited amount of food we do grow in-state.

I don't care much for Christie, but I'll vote for him before I'll let Corzine pave over the whole state.

Day 3, and right-wing "news" outlets continue to avoid dealing with the murder of a doctor as an act of fundamentalist terrorism.

Where do all of the "Keep America Safe" people disappear to when we're talking about supporting Israeli actions that inspire people to attack the U.S.? Is Israel's political agenda more important than the safety of Americans?

If you have valid questions about Sotomayer's qualifications, politics or whatever, then by all means ask them, and vote against confirmation if you don't like the answers.

However, you should keep something in mind: It harms the credibility of conservatives when people who are perceived as speaking for conservatives make ugly wisecracks about her. Your side seems to have a superfluity of loudmouths who say some pretty disgusting things in their attempts to rally your ever-shrinking base. Maybe you should teach them some manners, or, failing that, denounce their words as poor examples of civilized discourse.

Manny Miranda is not a computer hacker and did not hack anybody's computer. And, he did not hack anybody's e-mail, nor did he hack, tamper with, or even use, anybody else's computer.

So what? It was only a week or so ago that an Australian bank made a mistake and transferred $10 million to a customer's account, rather than the much smaller overdraught allowance that had been requested. The customer took the money and went on the lam. Guess what? This was a criminal act, even though the money had been deposited into the customer's account. The money wasn't theirs. The last I heard, Interpol was hot on their trail.

It's a crime to take stuff that isn't yours, even when the stuff isn't locked up. Manny Miranda knew damn well he was breaking the law, and so did all his colleagues who subsequently disowned him.

Your weasel-worded hair-splitting excuse making is disgusting.

... Republicans are actually doing what an opposition party is supposed to do, which is to play devil's advocate and oppose whatever the ruling party does.

Where on earth did you get the idea that an opposition party should oppose whatever the ruling party does?

You seem to be saying that an opposition party should oppose actions that are actually aligned with their own agenda just because the other party is attempting them. That is just plain obstruction. Note also that it renders "bipartisanship" (which Republicans claim to want from Democrats) an exercise in futility.