Virginia small businesses to employees: you’re not worth an extra 2 cents a day
Posted by: msgruntled on: November 19, 2009
Ah, the always-enlightened commonwealth of Virginia. Unemployment keeps going up. The Federal government offers to extend unemployment benefits via the stimulus plan. What does Virginia decide: No thanks, because that would raise the cost to businesses when the stimulus plan ends.
You know, you small businesspeople, if you can’t come up with less than $5 a year per worker, then maybe you suck at business. Shame on you for your continual astonishingly me-first worship of the almight buck.
Governor-elect Bob McDonnell, have I got a job-creation idea for you!
Posted by: msgruntled on: November 19, 2009
Dear Governor-Elect:
Since you ran on a job-creation platform, you might like this idea. Please hire some people to remove the 30-plus campaign signs from the median strips on Arlington Boulevard between Cedar Lane and Pickett Street. These are a form of visual pollution and besides, I believe it is well past time that you are required to remove them from public property. You can get them all up practically overnight, often 10 per linear yard, so surely, more than 2 weeks after the election, you could also have them removed.
No doubt there is some unemployed Virginian who could use the income.
So much for “evidence-based medicine”
Posted by: msgruntled on: November 17, 2009
Ah, the champions of evidence-based medicine: First, Merck, which wants everyone to ignore the clinical research that says plain old niacin is more effective that super-expensive Vytorin and Zetia; instead, Merck says we should wait for the results of their large self-funded study due in 2012. Hm, let’s see, that‘s 2 more years to line their pockets and rip off patients.
Then there‘s the American College of Radiology condemning changes in recommendations for screening mammograms—based on, you guessed it, evidence from research. Hm, does one wonder about the conflict of interest there?* One Harvard Medical School professor of radiology, Daniel Kopans, goes so far as to say the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that advised women to get screening mammograms less often are “idiots” who want to “do away with” screening. Well, apparently he is a true expert on idiocy, since that’s not what the Task Force recommended.
Perhaps Kopans and other radiologists drew on the advice of their accountants, and are about to recommend that instead of fewer mammograms, women should get them every 6 months.
Strikes me that President Obama’s hopes for moving to practicing medicine based on the best evidence of effectiveness is going to take a back seat as usual to the almighty concern to make a buck.
* I’m not the only one to suspect motives. Writing in Salon letters, Dr. Tone says:
Taking at face value what radiologists say about the need to consume more of their product is comparable to taking at face value what pharmaceutical companies say about the need to use more of their products. Even if they do have a point, it has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Let the GOP go without health care and solve the budget deficit
Posted by: msgruntled on: October 1, 2009
Quoting Garrison Keillor from Salon.com:
When an entire major party has excused itself from meaningful debate and a thoughtful U.S. senator like Orrin Hatch no longer finds it important to make sense and an up-and-comer like Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty attacks the president for giving a speech telling schoolchildren to work hard in school and get good grades, one starts to wonder if the country wouldn’t be better off without them and if Republicans should be cut out of the healthcare system entirely and simply provided with aspirin and hand sanitizer. Thirty-two percent of the population identifies with the GOP, and if we cut off healthcare to them, we could probably pay off the deficit in short order.
Isn’t is shameful that a party so committed to values and patriotism thinks it‘s okay to make their primary goal to bring down their nation‘s duly elected President?
After all, South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint was quoted in Politico.com as saying: ”This healthcare issue is D-Day for freedom in America. If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.” Such patriotism and moral values…
rants about rampant stupidity, hypocrisy, bad customer service, and other annoyances that are thinning my hair out
- Ex AIG chairman joins Hall of No Shame « msgruntled: [...] About Class warfare in America: the elephant in the room Introducing the Hall of No-Shame; Nominations welcome [...]
- jm: I just got the message from the Jack Stone dickhead.
- msgruntled: No he didn't pay penalties, he paid interest. There is a difference. The Washington Post covered this story in detail including several interviews wit
