SeniorJunior

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

Amid cheers from insurance companies (and their stockholders) at this being a no- hurricane hurricane season, we U.S.-ers have hardly noticed that the big storms seem to have moved to the Pacific. I’m sure you caught the horrific news of the “supertyphoon” that hit the Philippines and buried many villages and villagers in mud on Thursday. Here’s an excerpt from Bloomberg.com: Durian brought 249 kilometers an hour (155 miles an hour) winds and heavy rain that caused floods and mudslides in southeast Luzon, the nation's main island. It is the ninth tropical storm and typhoon to make landfall this year in the Philippines. The rainfall reached 466 millimeters, the country's largest since 1967, and exceeded the monthly amount in Albay, one of the provinces hardest hit, a government official said. ``The storm poured in one day an amount of rain that's greatly more than what that area gets in a month,'' Renato Solidum, director at the