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Google remembers Ghandi, astrology, the first day of spring, Dr. Seuss birthday but nothing about honoring the lives lost and the sacrifice given. Bunch of shmucks.

Studies show that unemployment and the fear of unemployment are bad for workers' health. Professor Kate Strully at Harvard's School of Public Health found in a recently published study that job loss can lead to heart disease, hypertension, stroke and diabetes. Frequent involuntary job changes also were found to be detrimental to the health of workers who were not already sick. For employees who were fired or laid off through no fault of their own, the increased risk of poorer health occurred mainly among blue-collar workers. The analysis was based on data from the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics,...

The Census Bureau released its annual income, poverty, and health insurance survey (2008) yesterday, giving both sides new numbers to use in the health-care debate. ObamaCare advocates can claim that the number of uninsured rose in the year, which it did, from 45.6 million in 2007 to 46.3 million in 2008. Opponents of the administration’s efforts can point to the increased numbers of Americans covered by insurance (255.1 million, up from 253.7 million in 2007) and the wider coverage of existing government programs — which increased by almost 5 million to 87.4 million people in 2008. The focus will fall...

Allies in War By David Horowitz FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, September 17, 2001: ON THE MORNING OF THE ATTACKS on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, along with a million other readers of the New York Times including many who would never be able to read the paper again, I opened its pages to be confronted by a color photo showing a middle-aged couple holding hands and affecting a defiant look at the camera. The article was headlined in an irony that could not have been more poignant, "No Regrets For A Love Of Explosives." The couple pictured were Bill...

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, 2.5 million more Americans people were pushed into poverty in 2008. The latest results which were being calculated as the recession began to strangle the country mark an 11-year high for the poverty rate.The poverty rate rose to 13.2 percent, or 39.8 million people, from 12.5 percent in 2007. Financial analysts say it marked the first annual increase in four years and data for 2009 will be far worse.These figures are particularly grim because they come after the disappointing record of the 2001-2007 expansion. Poverty was actually higher --...

Financial analysts who claim that China’s big banks will soon catch up with their Western counterparts in the league tables demonstrate a lack of understanding about what it takes to be a world-class player in this industry. Goldman, Sachs & Co. became a powerhouse by developing its culture, talent pool and infrastructure over the past century under the right mix of regulation and opportunity. For Chinese banks to reach the same competitive plane would likewise take decades, if they could manage it at all. First and foremost among the issues Chinese banks face is compensation. Wall Street, with its extraordinarily...

In 2008 I worked in the Konduz River Valley, known locally as the Valley of Four. The mayor, a former Taliban government minister, told me that the name (Chahar Darreh in Farsi) was a tribute to the four groups — Tajik, Uzbek, Turkomen, and Pashtun — that have lived together for decades in the valley, a floodplain dotted with mud-walled villages. The valley is isolated. To the west, a desert mountain range separates it from the thriving city of Mazar-e-Sharif. To the north, east, and south, the snake-like Konduz River cordons off the valley from Konduz City and the Ring...

Obama's regulatory chief pushes new 'bill of rights' Sunstein effort to change interpretation of Constitution by 2020 A government that is constitutionally required to offer each citizen a "useful" job in the farms or industries of the nation. A country whose leadership intercedes to ensure every farmer can sell his product for a good return. A nation that has the power to act against "unfair competition" and monopolies in business. This is not a description of Cuba, communist China, or the USSR until 1991. It's the vision of the future of the U.S, a radical new "bill of rights" drawn...

Let’s stipulate that it was wrong of Rep. Joe Wilson (R., S.C.) to shout “You lie” during President Obama’s health-care speech. It was a violation of courtesy and etiquette. Wilson apologized — which is more than the Democrats who booed President Bush’s State of the Union address in 2005 ever did. But I confess that watching at home, similar exclamations were heard. Some seemed to have burst, irrepressible, from my own lips. There was, for starters, this misleading assertion: “If you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, or Medicare, or...

On Wednesday night a broad chunk of the American left, and an overlapping circle of media commentators, got what they'd been aching for since the beginning of August: A presidential bitch-slap of the lying liars who've been, in the words of stereotypical L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten, "crowding out nearly all substantive and realistic discussion of the critical issues surrounding healthcare reform." "But know this," President Barack Obama said in one of several such satisfying passages in his health care speech last night. "I will not stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things...

Fifteen years after having an affair, a St. Tammany Parish man finally decided to come clean. But the fact that her husband's infidelity occurred a decade and a half ago did little to reduce Connie Davis' ire. The woman pulled out a gun loaded with birdshot and fired five times at her husband, hitting him twice, as he ran across the yard of their home near Pearl River on Tuesday, authorities said. The man, whose name was not released by the Sheriff's Office, ended up at a hospital. His wife landed in jail, booked with attempted murder. The man admitted...

What We Saw

Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina infuriated millions of smug liberals Wednesday night when he yelled out during President Obama's congressional speech, "You lie!" To which I heartily respond, "Representative Wilson, you are one red-blooded American hero." Peddling his healthcare plan to an increasingly skeptical electorate, Obama claimed, "The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally." The truth is, Obama's healthcare reform bill contains no mechanism to verify whether persons are U.S. citizens before they receive government benefits. So the president's statement was, a-hem, highly misleading. For years, conservatives have been unfailingly polite and...

One day after President Obama pitched his plan for comprehensive health-care reform to a joint session of Congress, administration officials struggled Thursday to detail how he would achieve his goal of extending coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans without increasing the deficit.

Joe Wilson speaks for me. In the chamber dedicated to the voice of the people, the voice of the people was heard. In the face of deception, in a flash of discourtesy, truth was spoken. “You lie!” Joe Wilson blurted, taking the words out of the mouths of millions of Americans watching at home. It was an observation both jarring and true. In point of fact the president was lying, he was engaging in deception, and out of 435 representatives of the people, just one had the instinctive impulse to say so. Joe Wilson speaks for me. Society’s worship of...

Shimkus walked on Obama: 'Frustrated' Rep. Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who yelled at President Barack Obama during his address to Congress this week, wasn't the only one unhappy with what he heard. Rep. John Shimkus, a Republican from Illinois, walked out. "Congressman Shimkus was frustrated that the president was not offering any new ground and left with just minutes remaining in the speech,'' spokesman Steven Tomaszewski said today in response to our question about the late-speech walk-out.

Jake Tapper has distinguished himself within the White House press corps as someone consistently willing to pose probing questions to the president and his aides. But on today's Good Morning America, ABC's chief White House correspondent used a particularly unflattering metaphor for Rep. Joe Wilson and his decision to go on Fox News to defend himself. As a clip of Rep. Wilson on last night's Sean Hannity show rolled . . . JAKE TAPPER: Although Wilson apologized to the White House for his lack of civility, he quickly took to the limelight of conservative media like a moth to a...

If we could get a look at the Bigot Jones's Diary we'd surely see a new eye popping entry from the former Green Czar. However, until those memoirs are released, we'll have to get by on this depiction of Van Jones leaving the White House after cleaning out his desk.

... Will seniors ever acquiesce to what Sarah Palin referred to as “death panels”? As our Cato colleague Will Wilkinson points out, that pejorative term is an inappropriate description of a necessary mechanism. Medicare’s funding is drying up. According to Medicare’s trustees, the Medicare Part A (Hospital Insurance) trust fund will be exhausted by 2017. And Medicare Parts B and D (supplementary medical insurance and the Medicare prescription-drug plans) are growing at breakneck speeds and imposing a heavy drain on federal general revenues — which provide more than three-quarters of their funding. A key part of the solution is to...

If we could get a look at the Bigot Jones's Diary we'd surely see a new eye popping entry from the former Green Czar. However, until those memoirs are released, we'll have to get by on this depiction of Van Jones leaving the White House after cleaning out his desk.