I think it's probably good that professional journalism as we know it has begun dying in earnest, because for too long our country has had it in its head that it could have it both ways -- that you could have truthseekers on the payroll and they'd be counted on to do their jobs impartially and without reservation or bias. And sadly, for too long, professional journalists have bought that particular story -- hence the rise of the celebrity journalists, and journalism-as-entertainment.

Journalism should be thankless labor confined to the few for whom it is truly a vocation, versus a career choice. Do you want your doctor to be in it only for the money, power, and fame? Or do you want them to be a doctor because they love the work, and want to make you better?

Why should we expect any less of journalists? Do you want them to be just check-cashers and word punters? Or do you want them to be deeply committed to sniffing out the story and spilling the beans to the rest of us?

The health of journalism is the health of democracy, true, and you can certainly measure the health or sickness of a democracy by the status of its journalists -- but the health of journalism has nothing to do with it as a career, or how big the checks are, and has everything to do do with whether journalists are informing people, misinforming them, or outright deceiving them. True journalists will ply their trade regardless of compensation, just as writers write because it's who they are.

If for some reason, they're not able to (or willing to) freeze the contracts or nullify them, what about cutting 80% of the bonus out of them, to reflect that the majority stakeholder in A.I.G. isn't interested in rewarding failure with lavish bonuses?

Sadly, the culture of corruption in Wall Street, American-style, rich-people's socialistic "never fail" capitalism, slides on as greasily as ever, regardless of who is in power.

Republicans can't simply acknowledge these truisms, however, because doing so would undermine the insurance industry that's filling their campaign coffers. So instead, we get pro-competition, government-is-ineffective "conservatives" working to thwart competition and implicitly admitting they believe the government will be too effective.

And, as ever, don't forget that these same Republicans are enjoying the single-payer healthcare they are denying the rest of the country. The ironies and absurdities abound in the healthcare "debate" in this country.

Medicare for All!

...to get universal healthcare in our country will be to deny it to the Congress; they enjoy it, including the Republicans who work hard to deny it to the rest of the country. Our representatives should have the same healthcare their constituents have/don't have, and Americans should pressure them accordingly. Until something like that happens, they have no incentive to reform our system. Medicare for All is at least something comprehensible to most Americans.

I'm excited to see it; your review makes me very hopeful. The ditching of the squid is for the best, as I always thought that was the weakest point of Ozy's plan -- seems like a simple genetic test would determine that the squid was of terrestrial origin (or at best cobbled together from native materials), regardless of how horrible it appeared. But, its absence likely won't be missed by anybody but the fanboys!

Talks like Goebbels, looks (and lives) like Goering, thinks like Himmler, acts like Hitler -- yeah, I think that's great that Limbaugh's the leader of the GOP, frankly, because he's the gift the keeps on giving, if the Democrats are bold enough to capitalize on it -- he can talk the Republicans right over the cliff.

And that bloated windbag doesn't have a ton of years left to him, and then where'll the GOP be without The Leader to bloviate for them? I doubt even their ideological farm system will have anybody capable of assuming his role once Limbaugh's gone.

"Revolution, absolutely," said Fuller.

Who'll fight in their revolution? The Republican Party shock troops are packed with chickenhawks. I really hope they do secede at some point -- the worst punishment that could be inflicted on those folks would be for them to actually have to live under their neo-theocratic/fascist ideology. They'd have to seal their borders to keep people in, ironically enough: "Tear down this wall, Mr. Limbaugh!"

His quote about Democrats offering a free lunch is a bit cockeyed, because who wouldn't want a free lunch? What he should've said is that there's no such thing as a free lunch -- so, he screwed that up, since most Americans are like "A free lunch? Yummy!"

Maybe Congresspeople should be paid according to the average pay of the constituents in their districts. So you'd get some incredibly rich ones, and some dirt-poor ones -- but at least they'd be representative of their constituencies.

Also, they shouldn't have national healthcare as currently enjoyed by Congress and the Judiciary -- since they won't allow their constituents to have the same healthcare they enjoy, they should have the same, for-profit, private health insurance their constituents do. That alone would probably fast track single-payer healthcare for the rest of us.