I won’t even go into detail on the health care reform debacle. But what it comes down to is our country is essentially run by the big-pockets. We have elected officials who together represent 10% of the population holding for ransom the other 90%. Lieberman is a foul excuse of a Senator. Get rid of this asshole and all the others who don’t represent their citizens but spend their time protecting Big Pharma, the insurance and banking industries and anyone else who will line their pockets.

This nation has gone to hell. Obama is an emasculated incrementalist and coward. Merry Christmas everyone, we powerless have-littles.

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.

What’s appalling, though not surprising from this state, is that the additional cost amounts to about $5 a worker PER YEAR, or 2¢ a day.

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.

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.

An 8-year study released this week by researchers from Harvard and McGill University (Raising the Global Floor: Dismantling the Myth that We Can’t Afford Good Working Conditions for Everyone) found that the U.S. lags behind most of the industrialized world in public policies of benefit to workers, like guaranteed paid sick leave, paid vacation, and a day of rest each week.

In a press release from the National Partnership for Women & Families, the study’s co-director, Jody Heymann, said:

“The world’s most successful and competitive nations are providing the supports the United States lacks, without harming their competitiveness. Globally, we found that none of these working conditions are linked with lower levels of economic competitiveness or employment. There simply is no negative relationship at all between decent working conditions and competitiveness or job creation. In fact, we found that a number of these guarantees are associated with increased competitiveness. Ensuring a floor of decent working conditions is crucial for the majority of Americans. The United States lags far behind most of the 190 countries whose labor laws we examined.”

In a blog post on Salon.com, Steve Klingaman suggests that America’s failure to provide the basics that other industrialized, economically competitive nations do, is because of a misguided idea that doing so is the encroachment of “socialism.” Gasp, not that! As Klingaman says,

We are the outliers because our commercial culture believes these benefits are the very definition of socialism.

Of course, as Gore Vidal once argued, in America, we want free enterprise for the poor and socialism only for the rich.

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.