Hospitals have priced themselves out of the market, that's all. In this depressionary economy, it's inevitable that the public will tell the hospital and pharma monopolies to go screw themselves. We're going to see laid-off nurse-practitioners opening their own clinics, with medications "illegally" bought offshore.

"Dr. Chu's hope is that we will "figure out" a way to develop carbon capture and sequestration technology "as quickly as possible." Because without such technology, there is no such thing as clean coal."

...the only way to have 'clean coal' is not to burn it at all. Coal in the ground is carbon that is already sequestered.

Men and women seek each other out just as they always have. Liberals, have fun staying home with your cats.

...and the problem with getting this part going is that the Democratic Party hasn't been able to transcend its hippie past. The economy started to decline in 1970 because these people pushed regulations explicitly designed to de-industrialize the country. It improved briefly with Reagan/Clinton and open markets, then sputtered again when the GOP forsook its own principles and allowed cronyism and monopoly formation by government edict.

Any bill that spends stimulus funds on infrastructure must include a 'screw the hippies' clause that rams it through the gratuitous opposition of Greens and NIMBYs. If there is going to be an economy again, you're going to have to have to put up with the sight of wind turbines on your horizon, more reactor units added to your local nuclear site, power lines joining those new solar arrays in the desert to the markets they serve, train tracks running through historic cities.

Am I suggesting sacrificing the environment for jobs? Actually, we would be accomplishing the opposite. Every raector that replaces a coal plant means less smog and carbon. The solar arrays and windmills won't harm any species worth saving, and will make us less dependent on imported fossils. And would that old building look better as an overpriced boutique, or as electric trains carrying thousands of commuters to work?

The Republicans lost popularity when they allowed religion to trump common sense. Look at yourselves, and dare to admit taht the Democrats made exactly the same mistake.

"... In a deregulated market, monopolies quickly develop."

Don't confuse 'free market' with 'Republican'. In an actual free market, the government wouldn't be able to grant the pharma companies special privileges to charge Americans the highest prices in the world for drugs, a price structure which stands because Washington made it illegal for us to shop anywhere else. In a free market, the entertainment industry wouldn't have special enforcement powers to copyright every human thought, as though it were artificial real estate created by government edict.

But it's not going to happen when militarization of law enforcement remains so lucrative. Seizure laws permit the police to grab any cash you have on you - there isn't even a specific limit that we can take care to observe - to funnel directly to its own budget without due process. Why would the Democrats ruin a perfectly good government revenue stream?

And as we have seen in the Phelps case, Prohibition gives sports monopolies infinite powers of control over their high-priced slave class. The Olympic Committee has the power to prevent Phelps from ever swimming internationally again, if it chooses to.

"But, Michael Phelps should be condemned for breaking the law. By breaking the law, he showed contempt for it. And all those people who say "all he did was smoke some weed" are also showing contempt for the law."

Sorry, but the Berwyn Heights massacre (look it up) eliminated the last shreds of any respect I once had for pot laws. Although the public has spoken on the issue in numerous state referenda, including two here in Arizona, the problem isn't going to go away until the general public simply uses massive noncompliance to effect change. This is one set of laws we NEED to show contempt for.

"In Germany, the trains run swiftly and silently, the airports are beautiful and clean and functional. I was in O'Hare just today. The subway is an embarrassment, squealing all the way out. O'Hare itself is not as bad as many others."

In Frankfort, the train whisks you right into the lower level of the airport. Why do so few of our airports integrate with the local transportation system? At Reagan, you have to schlep out to the parking lot to take the Metro. The summer I worked in San Francisco, the BART stopped short of the airport and I had to wait an hour for a shuttle bus. I understand that this has finally and recently been fixed, but the new train running through Phoenix, opened last month, doesn't venture into Sky Harbor either. But at least Sky Harbor integrates well with the local freeway system. Do Angelenos still have to endure that pokey hour of surface traffic on Century Boulevard to reach the freeway?

It works great, except for one annoying side effect: those giant clown eyelashes. They keep breaking off and getting in my eyes, which is especially hard on contact lens wearers, or folding over into my eyes when I put my lenses in.

So the marketing geniuses at Alcon have decided to turn a bug into a feature by marketing it as an eyelash growth drug. This is happening just as bimatoprost is about to go generic, which would allow all of us glaucoma users to get it cheap at Walmart. Obama, cue the antitrust cops.

Watch for that restless-leg medication that makes you gamble away your life savings to be marketed as an "entertainment enhancer"!

"This piece just drips contempt for its subject"

Which is exactly what the Salon audience wants.