Like members of Congress care what someone with no money say. If you don't like what they do in office, they'll just spend their money convincing you that their opponent eats a live baby every Sunday. The system is to far past broken to fix. The only questions now are when it gets torn down and by whom.

It doesn't need to be reviewed. Changing the title to all caps, adding page numbers, a header or a footer would count as "editing."

Yes, because when two opposing sides throw money at a politician, only one side can win, but the politician gets to keep all the money. Obviously one side was unable to buy him.

That's one theory. Another is that it was named "Gruntland" because of the shallow bays around it (grunt being a term for shallow bottom related to the English word aground). We probably won't ever know the truth. Other than that it hasn't been green for thousands of years... at minimum.

Under the ice on Greenland we would find lots of rock and gravel. Not much in the way of arable land. The people who think otherwise have never seen melting tundra or a glacier bed.

I think you're understanding. The pre-industrial level was 280 ppm. The amount required to prevent the coming ice age is 240 ppm. Therefore human CO2 emissions are not required to prevent this ice age. It's also why nobody else has predicted that an ice age will start in 1500 years.

I think it's just another step in the decline of "Nature".

I buy that CO2 could prevent or delay the onset of an ice age. What I don't by is the suggestion that an ice age is due to start 1500 years from now. Looking more carefully, I see that the value of CO2 level required to prevent an ice age 1500 years from now is below the pre-industrial level. In other words they've predicted an ice age that would, under no conceivable circumstance, occur and then said, look, it won't occur because of CO2. Yes, but then again our lakes aren't frozen in the summer now because of CO2. Maybe we should send out a press release.

If we didn't have them, we would be less likely to launch strikes on defenseless countries. Look at where the Tomahawk has been used since its deployment. The few launches that were necessary were largely unsuccessful, and would have been better accomplished with a couple dozen SEALs on helicopters.

I could have sworn you said three times the average income in town, not three times the average income in the gated development where they live. Sure, if you discount any area of Oakland that contains middle class or poor people, you'll get average incomes high enough to be 1/3rd of what doctors make. I see this problem in the Oakland hills, people who live there think that they are middle class because they are just like all the people that live around them. Many seem to have delusions that earning $250k per year and living in a $1.5M house is how everybody lives. Then again, people in much of the rest of the country making $45k and having a $300k mortgage on a house worth $100k think they are somehow part of the top 1% of earners.

Do you have receipts for all the MP3s on your computer? Do you think the prosecutor can't find an expert to testify that your IP address was seeding bittorrent?

American style "democracy" no longer works. It will get replaced with something else. Probably something worse.

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize -
Only be sure always to call it please 'research'.
-Tom Lehrer

You're telling me that doctors in say Oakland where the median household income is $46,000 are making no more than $138,000 per year? Which is weird, because in Oakland the average nursing salary is $138,000 per year. I'm calling bullshit on that one. No general practitioner in the Oakland metropolitan area would work for $150,000, with the exception of a few that specialize in serving the impoverished.

I agree salaries aren't the entire problem. Salaries aren't the problem at all, they are a symptom. The problem is that lobbying organizations for doctors and nurses control the certification and education process, and they manipulate it to restrict the number of doctors and nurses in practice. The nursing lobby is especially adept at lobbying for minimum staffing regardless of hospital needs (increasing demand for nurses) while simultaneously making it harder to certify nurses or import them from out of state and lobbying for limits to what nursing aids can do (reducing supply). All in the name of "better patient care," of course. It's a recipe for rising salaries. Doctors limit their supply by making it impossible to open a medical school or increase enrollment. Know a promising young student? Well, he's not going to be a doctor, because there's no room for him here. Besides, he got an A- in Calculus his freshman year.

Here in the USA, especially in the larger cities, a wisdom tool extraction isn't handled by a dentist, but by an oral surgeon. The fees are exponentially proportional to the number of syllables. You'll need anesthesia for the process, so there's an anesthesiologist.

When I needed by wisdom teeth out, the dentist said three were impacted and one was "bony impacted", and that it would cost about $700 per for an oral surgeon to remove them over the course of two or three visits and that I'd need pain killers for several days after each. I called my childhood dentist in a rural midwestern state and he said that didn't sound right. So I spent $500 on round trip airfare, went to my old dentist and he pulled them under Novocaine in less than an hour for $65 a piece. No general anesthesia. No stitches required. Pain was gone by morning and I got up early and went fishing.

But I won't come out and say oral surgery is a scam. My childhood dentist has long since required, and I'll need a root canal, and my dentist will send me to an oral surgeon for that because dentists don't do that anymore, apparently.

Insurance companies were required to be non-profits. I think we have Reagan to thank for the wonders of the for-profit free-market entering health care.

Last week the nurses at a hospital near here went out on a one day strike. Their issue, they were being asked to contribute about $1200 a year to their health care costs the way everyone else working there does. Whenever a reporter asked, they would say it was about patient care and that they were striking for their patients. "Strikes are a last resort, but nurses will only strike if they want to make sure that patients have safe care every day." They had a one day strike a couple months ago and one of the replacement nurses accidentally (probably) killed a patient. Oops. The nurses strike typically two or three times a year until the hospitals cave to their demands.

The average nurse's salary without overtime at those facilities: $138,000. Maximum non-overtime nurse's salary: $291,000. The median family income in the area: $46,000. The nurses don't see a connection between their salaries and increased health care costs. The doctors, of course, are independent contractors that set their own charges. You can be sure that they wouldn't be happy if a nurse could make as much as a doctor, so I'd guess $300,000 is the low end of their range.