Health "Care"

"Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report. The patients went to hospital emergency rooms 2,678 times from 2003 through 2008, said the report from the nonprofit Integrated Care Collaboration, a group of health care providers who care for low-income and uninsured patients."

Friday Morning Zeitgeist

Happy Friday, Folks! I drink your milkshake. I drink it up! At the gas pump, that is.

Oh, and now gay peoples can get married in California and petition their home states to recognize it. I feel a song comin' on.

Only one week to go until Memorial Day. I see rollercoasters...

More Opinons on the Economy

Moe, over at Jezebel, thinks Wall St should go fuck itself. I concur. The country probably wouldn't be in so much trouble if lenders hadn't been so damned greedy for the past few years, giving out loans to anyone and everyone without so much as checking an applicant's ability to actually repay said loan. What, did they think the bubble would never pop? All bubbles eventually burst. Oh, and There are no guarantees in the stock market.

However, don't fret! Our old pal Dick says "we're [just] going through a rough patch." Ya think? Bet he doesn't lose any sleep at night, since his financial well-being is tied up in Halliburton, which is doing quite well, thanks to our unending war in Iraq (and our distraction from Iraq, thanks to fears about the economy).

Economist Joseph Stiglitz says:

"Think about it this way: the war has cost each American family about $30,000. That's more money than some families make in a year. For others, it might not bankrupt them, but it could sure make a difference. It's about the price of a new car - whether you wanted to buy the car or not."

Wow. A new car I'll never have.

Actually, it's not the "car" I'm upset about. It's the blind leadership we've had in politics and the financial world for the past few years that makes me sad. Five years after starting the Iraq war, Dub-Dub has the gall to say it has been "worth it." Wow, what planet is he living on?

A mile a minute, that's me

More thoughts on recent news and happenings:

• My favorite radical feminist blogger responds to the Spitzer case and the media's [unsurprising] misogynist reporting . She says,

"I don’t know anything about “Kristen”, except that as a prostituted woman — however “high class” or “expensive” — she is a de facto sub-human. As are the millions of other, more invisible prostituted women she so inaccurately represents in the popular imagination. “Kristen” may achieve a kind of kitschy, pop-culture cachet because of the high status and celebrity of the asshole who used her as a meatsock, and she might be able to parlay her position as a footnote to history into some kind of financial reward — such things are not unheard of — but the vast majority of what so many progressives like to call “sex workers” subsist much, much more precariously. Some merely teeter on the precipice of indenture and some are genuinely enslaved, but all are subject to violence, disease, imprisonment, marginalization, shame, and all the other degradations, large and small, that accrue with membership in the planet’s most despised class."

Wow.

• Yes, the U.S. economy is indeed in the shitter. It was only so long before the effects of an overblown housing market could be staved off with tiny interest rate cuts and carefully worded statements from "important officials." Larry Elliott at The Guardian says,

"Bear Stearns marks the moment when the global financial crisis went critical. Up until last Friday, it had been possible - just about - to believe that the worst was over and that things were about to get better. That pretence was stripped away when JP Morgan, at the behest of the Federal Reserve, stepped in when the hedge funds pulled the plug on the fifth-biggest US investment bank." "Having allowed the housing boom to rage out of control for too long and then delaying cuts in interest rates until the housing market was gripped by recessionary forces, the Fed is now trying to make up for lost time with a burst of hyperactivity."

Kinda makes me glad I'm too poor to have given in to my home ownership lust. I'd probably be one of those suckers with an exploding adjustable rate mortgage facing foreclosure and a brand new set of ulcers.