None will ever need unemployment insurance. All of them can send their kids to the best private schools. None of these things affect them personally; they likely do not affect their family or friends (since they're all in the same social class). So they don't give a shit.

And for those who might be the type to care about people: since they don't generally encounter people who are not in their social class, they have no real knowledge that there are many people in existence whose lives depend on these things. They're clueless.

Some folks here make negative comments about what they call "RomneyCare," but in my experience, it works. Of course it's not perfect, but as I said, if it didn't exist I would have no health care at all.

My job got eliminated a year ago December and except for a low paying, life-sucking part-time, benefit-less for-now job, I have not been able to find employment. Because of what MA has done regarding health insurance, I have been covered all year. I am fortunate to have not had any serious health care issues this year, but routine care is important as well. Because of MA health care, I was able to get a mammogram. I got a colonoscopy. I got a pap smear, which all women should have annually but is even more important for me as a follow up to surgery that removed cancer cells a few years ago. Because of that gynecological appointment, my savvy doctor decided to measure my height, which had shrunk by an inch, and then sent me for a bone density test. That test showed that I have osteoporosis for which I'm now taking medication, affordable because of my health insurance.

If I didn't live in MA, I would not have had this insurance coverage and would not have received that medical care. As a single woman with no children, I was not eligible for Medicaid. Massachusetts has an entity called the Commonwealth Connector through which one can get insurance. Commonwealth Care is the program with subsidized plans for low or no income people. Commonwealth Choice is an exchange through which one can purchase a policy. I applied for the former and while I was waiting I decided to use money I'd saved to purchase a plan through the Choice piece. It cost me around $300 a month, which seemed reasonable considering how expensive health insurance tends to be. The next month I was approved for Commonwealth Care, which provided a plan with a fully subsidized premium. Yes, there were co-pays but they were similar to the amounts I paid when I got my insurance through work. When I started working part time, I had to pay $77 a month for the premium; I wasn't happy about it but it seems reasonable enough considering the cost of health insurance. Commonwealth Care places you in a tier for type of plan but you do have a choice of several plans. The differences in the tiers seem to mainly involve amount of co-pays. Commonwealth Choice also offers several plans at different price points for your purchasing choice. So far, I did not have any problem of the plans refusing care. With both Choice and Care, they are group plans, not individual plans. There was no regard for health status or pre-existing conditions. Individual plans are pretty much useless because they are way too expensive and give too little coverage--if they'll even take you at all. So I am extremely grateful that Massachusetts passed its health care bill. My main fear is that they will end up cutting back because of the state of government finances these days.

so of course they want more patients there, which is more likely to happen when people don't get preventive care, which they don't get if they don't have health insurance. Ergo, they, the Medical Industrial Complex, don't want people to have health insurance because they make more money that way!

Edwards (or Biden, if he's on the ballot). I have to do further research into Clinton and Obama to see if I really like or really dislike one of them. If that doesn't happen, I might give my vote to one of my earlier preferences to express my anger at the corporate media (in cahoots with its parent, the corporatocracy) deciding for us who our candidates will be.

We hear about that group because they're the loud ones. But there are people, and entire churches, who call themselves evangelical but listen more to Jesus' words and act like one would expect real Christians to act (unlike the wingnuts). I contend that THOSE are the evangelicals being reached out to with talk about religion. Many of these people will then stop and listen to a Dem who claims his Christianity, and then realize that the Dems are the party whose policies are more in line with their beliefs.

I know how bad the job market is because I've been unemployed and actively looking for work for the better part of 2 years. The idiot-in-chief is full of you-know-what when he says education is the answer: I have high intelligence and an advanced degree, and those things sure haven't helped.

When it's an employers' market, I'd say one has to assume that the supply of workers exceeds the demand, which would certainly indicate high unemployment. My experience in the past two years attests to it being an employers' market. I've found that when an employer sees a potential employee who has 95% of what they'd like to find, they pass and wait to find someone with 100%, if not 110%--because they can. I've received phone interviews for jobs for which 'm extremely qualified, but I have not received an in-person interview. Why? Because they had "so many qualified candidates" that they narrowed it down to "those who most meet our needs" at the present time--whatever that means. They want the person who has performed the exact task(s) in the exact same business/industry with the exact same type of workplace.

And here's something else employers are doing today: not wanting to waste time and money training a new employee, they only give the new hire a short amount of time to learn the myriad pieces of information enabling her to do the job perfectly. The job description may say the position has a six-month probationary period, but companies are shortening that to about a month! After I got "let go" (ie fired) after about 5-6 weeks from a job as a proofreader, a position at which I've always excelled, I learned some interesting news. Upon filing for Unemployment, the woman with whom I spoke said that my situation was not unique. She's been seeing this lately: about a month or so after hiring a new employee, many companies decide to let her go. Welcome to the brave new world!

They've been working to reverse any sixties ideas and policies and programs that have improved life for most Americans. Eight years of Reagan did a lot of the job, and now with eight years of bush, even more has been accomplished to that end. These folks also bad-mouth sixties ideals every chance they get, they revise history when they can. They want to wipe it away completely. They've had much success toward that end, which is giving them the opportunity--and they also have the power--to work on their other major goal: to reverse all the good things that FDR did to make Americans' lives better.

I truly believe Clark could have and would have gotten our country back on the right track and I'm very sad that he's not running. When the primary season started, I was really liking Joe Biden, for some of the same reasons I liked Clark. Unfortunately, he's no longer running.

I'm not especially happy with the remaining field. Yes, I think any one of them would make a good President but at this point in time, we need a great President. I don't see one just yet. I'm going to have to do some serious studying of each candidate's views on every issue, as well as their plans as to what they'd do once in office.

I hope I'm wrong, but I don't believe Hillary can win the general election, and I'm also not certain if Obama can. And I hope the Democratic Party does not snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Well, we're not at the end of it yet, but it seems to be getting closer every day. When Reagan did that, it let the corporations know that they could trample over workers and unions with impunity and get away with it. I used to think he was our worst president, until our current one came along. Reagan ushered in the "greed is good" eighties, the beginning of the right wing's ruination of our once great nation.

I still remember the day he got elected. I was riding the subway into Boston, writing bad poetry expressing the scary place to which our country was heading. I was terrified for the future of this country, especially thinking of what he could do to the Supreme Court with any appointments he might have. Unfortunately, bush le fils has picked up where he left off--in overdrive--in all areas AND has appointed right wing activist judges who will continue making things worse for this country for years to come.

perhaps a month before the convention. There would be more time to see and hear the candidates and voters/elections would not be affected by the states who happen to go first. Of course we'd need real campaign finance reform to keep corporations and the rich from practically dictating our candidates to us. Publicly financed elections to keep all candidates on a level playing field would also be nice. Of course this won't happen until we have to dodge the pig shit coming down on our heads from above.

Many of us wrote off McCain very early in this campaign. We were thinking that his time had passed, nobody was all that interested in him anymore. The media always talks about Guiliani and Romney, with Huckabee suddenly polling well and therefore garnering media attention.

All of a sudden, McCain is getting the endorsements, perhaps the bulk of them for Republican candidates. The "Boston Herald" even declined to endorse a Democratic candidate because they felt so strongly the McCain is the one person who absolutely should be our next President.

What is going on here? Bush and his war are highly unpopular, and McCain is the one candidate who has hitched his wagon to Bush and his war as other Republicans are scrambling to distance themselves from the unpopular administration. And yet he's getting all these endorsements.

I know endorsements don't directly translate into votes, but I'm sure some voters are influenced by them, perhaps particularly those who don't do their own research into the candidates (probably most people). Endorsements also bring attention to the candidates who get them, which means the media will be more likely to cover McCain and he will be more likely to start polling higher than he has been.

Many people also still see McCain as the maverick with the straight-talk express that they saw in his earlier presidential run. They also have the impression that he's somewhat "liberal," which is far from the truth. McCain may have been joking when he sang, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann," but I do not think it is funny, and it's also a tacky and irresposible thing for an elected, or appointed, official to say. I would not want this man to become the President of the United States.

In 2000, his easy-going facade and less than stellar brain-power lulled me into thinking his presidency would be pretty innocuous. But by the time of the 2004 election, I was terrified that if he got re-elected, this country would be destroyed; it would never be the same again--if the world didn't blow up first. People to whom I made that comment thought I was nuts. This is one rare case where I hate the fact that I seem to be proven right. Our country may still exist, but with the trampling of the Constitution and such it is not the same, and the country could easily be further destroyed before his term is up. And with all the bad stuff going on around the world, much of it directly or indirectly related to bush's words and actions, I have even more fear of the world blowing up.

My HMO states that it pays 100% of diagnostic procedures; no copayment required. So, when the bill for my ultrasound included a $15.00 copay, I called the HMO to question it. You won't believe what I was told. When I had the ultrasound, I got an injection of a contrast agent, which makes the image easier to see. The man on the phone told me that this was the reason for the copay. He explained that anything invasive--and an injection counts as invasive--can be called surgery, and of course, surgery requires a copay. Since I had the ultrasound, with injection, in what was considered an office (an ultrasound facility), I had to pay the $15.00 office visit copay. But--and this gets worse--if this had been done in a hospital or day surgery center, I would have been subject to the $250.00 surgery copay. Unbelievable the lengths these "health insurance" entities go to squeeze more money out of the patient. I can't say I'm surprised, but I am appalled.

What does it mean? What constitutes "winning"? The situation is a complex mess, and the black and white concepts of "victory" and "defeat" are not particularly applicable.

Everyone wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein. Made for too much competition to get jobs in the field; makes me wonder how the standards in the profession have sunk as low as they now seem to be. Maybe because the journalism outlets have been swallowed up by mega-corporations who only care about the bottom line, rather than performing the service of keeping people informed as to what is actually going on in the world.

Where did you study Mass Comm?