SeniorJunior

It all started as I was grinding my teeth yesterday, listening to RWR (right wing radio). Senator James Inhofe was a guest on the Sean Hannity program. Inhofe is the "flat earth" senator from Oklahoma. He was saying environmentally-oriented people worried about global warming "want us to give up our cars, stop building new homes and buildings, sacrifice our way of life for this hoax they call global warming." Etc. So I was thinking, what's an uninformed person to think? Probably "Is this true? Damn those lefty tree huggers." I mean he IS a U.S. Senator. Would he lie? Well you betcha, but unless you know his history, how would you know? Can you believe, for instance, when a critic of the Iraq war says there has been huge fraud and theft by war profiteers? Maybe they are all liars, righties and lefties, saying whatever it takes to make their points. I still believe that solid Journalism is the antidote to this kind of debilitating cynicism. The Wall Stre

[From Reuters.com] 440,000 Deaths per Year By Jason Szep BOSTON, Jan 18 (Reuters) - The amount of nicotine that smokers typically inhale per cigarette rose by 11 percent from 1998 to 2005, perpetuating a "tobacco pandemic" that makes it harder for smokers to quit, a Harvard study said on Thursday.……….. "Cigarettes are finely tuned drug delivery devices designed to perpetuate a tobacco pandemic," said Howard Koh, the school's associate dean for public health practice and former Massachusetts commissioner of public health. …………. "The end result is a product that is potentially more addictive," the study said. …………. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers cigarette smoking the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. About 440,000 people die each year from lung cancer and other diseases related to tobacco use. Whole story at: http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=&a

HOORAY FOR THE SENIOR GENERATION A very self-important college freshman at a recent football game, took it upon himself to explain to a senior citizen sitting next to him why it was impossible for the older generation to understand his own. "You grew up in a different, actually almost primitive, world," the student said loud enough for the whole crowd to hear. "We young people today grew up with television, jet planes, space travel, man walking on the moon, our spaceships have visited Mars... We even have nuclear energy, electric and hydrogen cars, computers with light speed processing ....and uh.." Taking advantage of a pause for breath in the student's litany, the "wize senior citizen" said, "You're right, Son....We didn't have those things when we were young........so we invented them...... you arrogant little shithead!!!

(From The Wall Street Journal – my favorite newspaper) "...The worried industries and their trade groups are responding by hiring new lobbying talent, planning mass-market ad campaigns and, in some cases, focusing on getting goodies attached to legislation that they would rather see killed but know they can't stop. The petroleum industry, for example, is preparing an ad campaign that seeks to justify oil companies' huge size -- and profits. The drug industry is weighing a mass-media counterattack of its own, emphasizing the good performance of the Medicare prescription-drug program. Student-loan titan Sallie Mae is rallying grass-roots support from college administrators. Small-business representatives are talking up tax breaks to offset what appears to be an inevitable increase in the minimum wage...." That excerpt from: Business Mobilizes to Defend Turf Firms Plot Campaigns to Counter Effects of Democrats' Agenda (I’m not sure if you can li

Just had my first yesterday. Very high tech; very expensive. 893 bucks for 24 minutes in the chair. But think of the fringes I received. 1. Good looking people - handsome young dentist, gorgeous young tech. 2. Great ambiance - Japanese decor, snow falling on bamboo garden with smiling Buddha . 3. High tech stuff - digital X-rays, fast acting anesthetic. The dentist was charming but very succinct - after all, at $37 a minute, one mustn't dawdle. The practice "Advanced Endodontics " has two dentists, two techs, two receptionists and does nothing but canal roots and coin money. My tooth is "calming down," still painful but a helluva lot better. The only moral to the story is "Get dental insurance."

The “We stand down when they stand up” slogan has bothered me for some time, especially in the light of all the news reports about how inadequate our training efforts have been. Why the heck haven’t we done this right? Suddenly an argument broke out in my brain – the left side against the right side, the optimist against the pessimist – I don’t know. I do know that in this little colloquy lies the seed of inaction: W E SPOKE.... Put more and better military and police training personnel to work training the Iraqis. (Shoulda been doing that for two years.) WON’T WORK. THOSE PEOPLE ARE LOYAL TO THEIR MULLAHS & THEIR MILITIAS, NOT TO THE “UNIFIED GOVERNMENT.” Equip them better. Give them decent body armor, vehicles and communications gear. WON’T WORK. THEY WILL JUST USE THE GEAR IN ATTACKS ON US. Get them paid their salaries on time – might win a bit of the loyalty back to the government. WON’T WORK. THEY WILL FUNNEL MUCH OF THE MO

From today’s (12/06/06) Wall Street Journal Online (my favorite newspaper): WASHINGTON -- Like a retreating army, Republicans are tearing up railroad track and planting legislative land mines to make it harder for Democrats to govern when they take power in Congress next month. Already, the Republican leadership has moved to saddle the new Democratic majority with responsibility for resolving $463 billion in spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. And the departing chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Bill Thomas (R., Calif.), has been demanding that the Democrat-crafted 2008 budget absorb most of the $13 billion in costs incurred from a decision now to protect physician reimbursements under Medicare. The collapse of the appropriations process will be felt soon in the Justice and Commerce departments, food-safety agencies and veterans' health care. "It's not just a mess. It's a mountainous mess," complained Wisconsin Rep. Da