blogger's pissing me off today

I've got a whole post ready to go that's trapped in a POST request that blogger is choking on, and I can't back up and save it because the stupid editor is JS based and doesn't reload the way it should.

(mental note: remember that when you're integrating wysiwyg into sitescribe.)

blogger test post

This is a test to see what blogger is going to do with various and sundry postings.

paragraph separation
new line
strikeout
bold
iltalic bold yellow

And the other shoe drops....

I was starting to wonder when the poor and middle classes would start to reap the benefits of the election disaster 2004--looks like we didn't have long to wait.

In a time in which college tuition rate increases outpace the rate of inflation by more than three four times , our illustrious administration is about to pass legislation that clears the way for the government to dramatically reduce grants and subsidized loans to college students. As many as 100,000 students may be affected, especially in states with high state taxes as part of the revision of the formula from the Department of Education (who is already a Permanent Charter Member of my Shitlist for maintaining that someone isn't an independent until they're 24 years old) reduces by as much as half the amount of state taxes that may be deducted from one's income, making it appear as though hundreds or thousands of dollars have magically been added to one's income by the wee StudentLoan Leprachauns.

Bullshit. My congressional delegation is going to hear about this one, at length and with great gusto.

An interesting article on prescription drugs. I don't know that its the final word on it--and its a more economically conservative bent than you usually see out of the New Yorker--but it certainly gives food for thought.

Living without health insurance for well over a year now has given me perspective from both sides of the coin. Certainly there's a case to be made that the costs of medical care are at least in part derived from people with no economic stake making decisions which they are most likely not scientifically qualified to make; for example, (and I'm stealing this example from the article) the patient who insists on a COX2 inhibitor, which probably isn't going to be any more effective than your typical aspirin/ibuprofen/acetominophen regimen at relieving arthritis pain, but costs hundreds more per month. But its also ridiculous that we live in a country with a per-capita income that dwarfs the LIFETIME income of a citizen in half the world and we haven't got any kind of national healthcare system.

There's got to be some middle ground, and by middle ground I'm not referring to a bogus scheme involving a savings account.