There may be no good way to fire somebody, but bad ways abound. Remember Alec Baldwin’s Glengarry Glen Ross speech, for instance?

“The good news is you’re fired. The bad news is you’ve got – all of you’ve got – just one week to re-gain your jobs…Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. Because we’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired. You get the picture?”

The end-of-the-line tales recounted in How I Got Laid Off don’t reach that level of raw capitalistic dehumanization, perhaps, but they’re no odes to empathy either. The site describes its mission as “capturing and chronicling the stories of the people who have recently been ‘let go,’ including the often despicable methods in which they were dispatched.”

Amid the posturing, politicking, and general confusion of the health care debate, it’s easy to lose sight of the situation on the ground and the reasons that reform made it to the top of the agenda in the first place. The growing number of uninsured is one major factor, and the sense of powerlessness among [...]

The Huffington Post asked its readers who have started small businesses after losing their jobs to send in their stories. The site then picked 31 to represent in a slide show it calls “The Recession’s Accidental Entrepeneurs.”

Amid the posturing, politicking, and general confusion of the health care debate, it’s easy to lose sight of the situation on the ground and the reasons that reform made it to the top of the agenda in the first place. stethoscopeThe growing number of uninsured is one major factor, and the sense of powerlessness among many who have been forced to negotiate and plead with their insurance companies is another. In a series of posts this week we present some health care horror stories gleaned from consumer sites online. Keeping in mind that a license to complain is issued with every keyboard nowadays, the sheer breadth and scope of these Kafkaesque encounters, coupled with the frequent tone of weariness and desperation, serve as a powerful indictment of the present system.

Here’s what you need to know about Jay Field: He’s been a camp counselor, house painter, swimming pool technician, book shelver, cake jockey, would-be Internet mogul, and public radio journalist. But he lost that last job at the start of the recession and “finding a new gig, in or out of journalism, has been far [...]

Our friend the Wheelchair Kamikaze, who has written so eloquently about his experience with the insurance companies, objects to a study that finds that “multiple sclerosis (MS) delivers a massive blow to your job prospects as well as your health.” Let me save the research world some hard work and money. I’ve done some non-MS [...]

After all these years, the level and proliferation of DIY initiative on the Web still amazes. Here’s a dude, a self-described progressive, who’s been streaming his own political commentary with some pals since 2005. He’s amassed nearly 80,000 YouTube subscribers and 10,000,000 channel views. Now he’s mounting a campaign to convince MSNBC to make him [...]

Extracts from the Phoblographer’s Stream of Consciousness Reaction To Obama’s Speech: Mitch McConnell will always be a creepy smiler. Joe Biden confirms the speech is in the envelope. Well done, Joe. Teddy Roose first called for reform. God, we’re slow. If I lost my job right now, we’d have to move to England because there’s [...]

At least one lawyers’s group isn’t so enthused about the President’s nod to tort reform last night. From a flak at the American Association for Justice: Of particular interest to this community are the President’s comments regarding medical malpractice. The pilot programs outlined by President Obama will require more detail. But we all know the [...]

Reader comments from the New York Times site: Listening to Pres.Obama, who I happily voted for, pains me. He sounds no different than any of the other in office guys I hear try and make a point on the cliches of others. He says, “These are the facts… we need to reform the system. Single [...]