I'm sorry but you sound like the dystopian assholes Ira Levin made fun of in This Perfect Day.

Because being on The View is so above it all and Presidential and shit.

Not bloody likely.

A) their premium costs to the employees have risen on average 15%/year for each of the last 10 years.

B) coverage is dropping steadily year by year

C) $150 is less than half of one month's premium for one of their average plans

So basically the secret to affordable health care is

never get sick

never be related to anyone who's ever been sick

spend more money

eat healthier so they don't have to pay for that procedure you need, which they aren't going to cover anyway.

You're too white to have an opinion. Please sit the fuck down.

Douchebag, care to elaborate? No I thought not. Fucking fool.

It's called an access fee and it's typically paid to the municipality. Like Cary, NC which gets 15% of Time Warner's billings in Cary, off the top for the exclusive right to deliver cable service. It's highly unlikely that municipalities are going to stand on ceremony and give up that kickback.

Now consider that POTS will eventually have to compete on equal footing with VoIP which is subject to none of the same tariffs, taxes and regulations, or Federal oversight, and you start to see the irrelevance of this whole topic soon. Unlike POTS If you want to use a strong encryption dialer for VoIP it's pretty mundane. Even the NSA would have a hard time cracking it in a cost effective manner. So perhaps in the end you just have to make it impractical for the government to spy on you.

As always, one of the most secure forms of electronic conversation in a scenario where automation is skimming all traffic looking for something relevant, as opposed to a targeted tap on a unique conversation, is a handwritten fax. Machines still have a devil of a time decoding that. Put it in a foreign language it's even harder.

Soon I won't care at all. It's all become prattle and stupidity. Anyway didn't Salon readers determine there's no such thing as sexism, only racism?

It's all nonsense either way. There is no such thing as terrorism in the US. Screaming about 911 is like fighting the War on Volcanoes.

No drilling. Too little too late. Check

No coal. Too dirty, hurts mountains. Check

No nuclear. Too scary. Check

Ok, so other than starving in the cold and dark, what have you got?

Everyone should stop exploring and drilling everywhere. After all, it won't have any measurable effect for decades, can't alter the price in any way, no matter what. Those new discoveries in Angola and Brazil? Forget it, it's a just a fake boondoggle.

Oh so it's the Jew's fault. Thanks for clearing that up. Obama, who doesn't have overwhelming support among Jews, speaking in Detroit which also doesn't have very many Jews, shoos away Muslims, who DO support him, and it's his own operatives who do it. And it's the Jew's fault. Thanks again.

This column isn't about that. It's about fashion, plastic surgery, gay marriage, sex toys. And for what it's worth, it's preponderance of coverage about west Asia/mideast is more or less about what rights are afforded wealthy to middle class women who (sort of) have the freedom to ignore those restrictions anyhow. Hanging children and gays w/o trials, in public, from cranes, in the town square is simply not something discussed on Sex in the City. Sorry. Anyway....George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush George Bush

Honestly I forget who said it decades ago but it was "The factory of the future will have two employees; a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog and the dog is there to ensure the man doesn't touch anything."

Unfortunately that isn't complete implemented yet. I went to Wal*Mart today and there were two human staffed checkout lines. The self checkout lines simply did not operate correctly, some problem with the scales or like that. So I wound up behind a long line of shopping carts, between a bored clerk who didn't look all that bright, and swarms of shoppers with a limited grasp of English. I would hope that in the next year or so Wal*Mart perfects their scanners so as to avoid that.

Commodity steel, recycled steel, 'ordinary' steel. You crush up cars where the cars to be crushed up, are. For the same reason that car companies like Toyota realized 25 years ago that it's cheaper and more efficient to build cars in the markets in which they are consumed. So around 1988 or so you saw the last Toyotas built in Japan. After that they were built in the US for the US.