The Healthcare Economist, annotating Obama’s health care address: We are the only advanced democracy on Earth – the only wealthy nation – that allows such hardships for millions of its people. One must keep in mind that although health insurance is important, it is only a means to an end. That end is better health. [...]

Huh. There seems to be a lot of negativity about President Obama’s speech on the Republican National Committee Twitter feed. Go figure. The Republicans are also tweeting up a storm on #healthcare, per Tweet Congress. Meanwhile, the House Democrats haven’t tweeted on their feed since early August. They’ll really need to narrow the Tweet-gap if [...]

Tomorrow we’ll be covering reaction to Obama’s big speech, but for today we thought it would be interesting to take a look at some of the many blogs addressing health care reform. While the town-hall clashes have driven a lot of the media coverage and informed the debate to perhaps an outsize degree, medical professionals [...]

In case you took a vacation from thinking about health care over the holiday weekend and missed the latest town-hall stunt to draw the adoring praises of the anti-reform crowd, here it is. You have to watch or fast forward to 1:13 for the money (literally) shot. The congressman is Norm Dicks (D – natch, [...]

The price of gold rushed past $1000 per ounce today, sending it within glittering distance of last year’s record high before profit-taking ate into gains. But the breach of the psychological $1000 barrier has put a sparkle into the eyes of those who have been accumulating the precious metal, and has them looking for more [...]

As we’ve already seen, courtesy of the health care debate: Ideologies are colliding within people’s very own Friends List on Facebook. Another such interaction:

A hodgepodge of user-generated and other content from around the Web: This week’s weird jobs (Business Pundit) AFL-CIO: Young Workers – A Lost Decade – the labor union’s report Not Big Labor’s Day – U.S. Chamber of Commerce The 5 Social Media Types Who End Up Losing Their Job (Applicant.com) George Soros: America’s New Engine [...]

You know the answer to that if you happened to catch Floyd Norris’s column in the New York Times today: “It was he who, at the end of 1861, figured out that the American government simply needed to print money to pay for the Civil War. It was economic heresy then, but without it this [...]

Referring to the current recessionary cycle, Joseph Stiglitz says we may be in for a W-shaped recovery. Norel Roubini thinks we could go W or U. George Soros said he didn’t see a V anywhere in site. What, exactly, are they talking about? Let us consult the Wiki. V-shaped recession: “The economy suffers a sharp [...]

Interesting post on the naked capitalism blog today, taking off on Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s comment that the U.S. may be in the middle of a W-shaped—or double dip—recession. Which means another economic contraction sooner rather than later. As poster Yves Smith sees it: The real issue is the ongoing con job. Team [...]