My sister lost her job several months ago

and she cannot find anyone hiring in her area or anywhere near her area.  She is a registered nurse and is in the process of a divorce and is trying to raise 2 little girls. 

Remember when RNs were needed everywhere?  Now they can't even find jobs.

• Unemployment numbers. What is 12.5 Million? - Sunflower
  • My eldest son has been unemployed since - Backwards typist
    • My sister lost her job several months ago - sm
  • And yet MILLIONS of illegals are taking jobs in this - country! Where's the outrage??!!! nm
    • As are 3rd World countries, because Dubya - handed out perks for offshoring them.
      • Try again - Outrage should be with - me
        • Funny how they always want - sm
      • Nice try, but once again - GhostMom
    • Yeah, I really see the unemployed folks in my area clamoring for those meat- sm - CDW
      • I bet some of them would - sm
      • My family members have worked in fields and orchards and on farms - GhostMom
      • We have a meat packing plant in my town - sm
      • From where I sit...... - sm
        • offshore - blueintheface

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so, I called his financial advisor yesterday and told him to put hubby in a "safe" plan. It's now in a money market fund that is part of his IRA.

I have no choice. I have to stay where I am. I have no "safe" available. Neither of us will be able to retire on what is now in our 401Ks and you're not the only one. We couldn't buy a car with Both our 401Ks, let alone live on it.

We are late starters for retirement  not until our late 40s funds (most of our employers did not offer pensions). We are now of the first retirement tier and although we own our home outright, if we live until we are 90, there is no way we can live off retirement 401Ks or SS.

My husband's father told him back in the 50s that we would experience something like what is happening today and stated it would be worse than the ཙ crash. It is sure starting to look that way, but we will survive some way, I hope.

We need to pray for the people on SS now that cannot survive. I, for one, would love to help them, but can't help ourselves at this moment.

decided to move into the parents' place after the parents passed on.  There was some (a lot of)  rehab work to be done. 

So she and I were patching and painting in the living room.  BIL was working on cabinets in the kitchen.  Sis and I were having a good time and laughing in there.  Playing music, dancing and carrying on, but actually accomplishing what we needed to do.   BIL actually came in and YELLED at us for having 'too much fun.'  I believe he must have thought we were laughing at him. (Which actually we had not been, until he came in and made an absolute doofus of himself.  After which we could hardly keep a straight face.) 

Nope, he really never did not fit in.  Fortunately, the humor gene was passed on to their daughter; must have been X chromosome linked. 

These haters seem to forget where their ancestors came from and why they came in the first place!!  Duh, is it because they wanted the opportunity to better their lives, or practice their religion freely?  I wonder if when our forefathers wrote the Constitution they intended there to be an expiration date?   And those same ancestors are the ones that came over here, killed all the Native Americans they could, and the ones they didn't forced them into their religion and then put them on reservations.  Kind of sound like history repeating itself.

to speak about her.  Why won't she be interviewed?  What are the repubs hiding by keeping her in a cocoon? 

Dear Newt,

I recently had the displeasure of watching you bash the protestors of the Prop 8 marriage ban to Bill O'Reilly on FOX News. I must say, after years of watching you build your career by stirring up the fears and prejudices of the far right, I feel compelled to use the words of your idol, Ronald Reagan, "There you go, again."
However, I realize that you may have been a little preoccupied lately with planning your resurrection as the savior of your party, so I thought I would fill you in on a few important developments you might have overlooked.

The truth is that you're living in a world that no longer exists. I, along with millions of Americans, clearly see the world the way it as -- and we embrace what it can be. You, on the other hand, seem incapable of looking for new ideas or moving beyond what worked in the past.

Welcome to the 21st century, big bro. I can understand why you're so afraid of the energy that has been unleashed after gay and lesbian couples had their rights stripped away from them by a hateful campaign. I can see why you're sounding the alarm against the activists who use all the latest tech tools to build these rallies from the ground up in cities across the country.

This unstoppable progress has at its core a group we at HRC call Generation Equality. They are the most supportive of full LGBT equality than any American generation ever -- and when it comes to the politics of division, well, they don't roll that way. 18-24 year olds voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8 and overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. And the numbers of young progressive voters will only continue to grow. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, about 23 million 18-29 year olds voted on Nov. 4, 2008 -- the most young voters ever to cast a ballot in a presidential election. That's an increase of 3 million more voters compared to 2004.

These are the same people who helped elect Barack Obama and sent a decisive message to your party. These young people are the future and their energy will continue to drive our country forward. Even older Americans are turning their backs on the politics of fear and demagoguery that you and your cronies have perfected over the years.

This is a movement of the people that you most fear. It's a movement of progress -- and your words on FOX News only show how truly desperate you are to maintain control of a world that is changing before your very eyes.

Then again, we've seen these tactics before. We know how much the right likes to play political and cultural hardball, and then turn around and accuse us of lashing out first. You give a pass to a religious group -- one that looks down upon minorities and women -- when they use their money and membership roles to roll back the rights of others, and then you label us "fascists" when we fight back. You belittle the relationships of gay and lesbian couples, and yet somehow neglect to explain who anointed you the protector of "traditional" marriage. And, of course, you've also mastered taking the foolish actions of a few people and then indicting an entire population based on those mistakes. I fail to see how any of these patterns coincide with the values of "historic Christianity" you claim to champion.

Again, nothing new here. This is just more of the blatant hypocrisy we're used to hearing.

What really worries me is that you are always willing to use LGBT Americans as political weapons to further your ambitions. That's really so ྖs, Newt. In this day and age, it's embarrassing to watch you talk like that. You should be more afraid of the new political climate in America, because, there is no place for you in it.

In other words, stop being a hater, big bro.

The health-care reform debate is in full roar with the arrival of Michael Moore's documentary Sicko, which compares the U.S. system unfavorably with single-payer systems around the world. Critics of the film are quick to trot out a common defense of the American way: For all its problems, they say, U.S. patients at least don't have to endure the endless waits for medical care endemic to government-run systems. The lobbying group America's Health Insurance Plans spells it out in a rebuttal to Sicko: "The American people do not support a government takeover of the entire health-care system because they know that means long waits for rationed care."

In reality, both data and anecdotes show that the American people are already waiting as long or longer than patients living with universal health-care systems. Take Susan M., a 54-year-old human resources executive in New York City. She faithfully makes an appointment for a mammogram every April, knowing the wait will be at least six weeks. She went in for her routine screening at the end of May, then had another because the first wasn't clear. That second X-ray showed an abnormality, and the doctor wanted to perform a needle biopsy, an outpatient procedure. His first available date: mid-August. "I completely freaked out," Susan says. "I couldn't imagine spending the summer with this hanging over my head." After many calls to five different facilities, she found a clinic that agreed to read her existing mammograms on June 25 and promised to schedule a follow-up MRI and biopsy if needed within 10 days. A full month had passed since the first suspicious X-rays. Ultimately, she was told the abnormality was nothing to worry about, but she should have another mammogram in six months. Taking no chances, she made an appointment on the spot. "The system is clearly broken," she laments.

It's not just broken for breast exams. If you find a suspicious-looking mole and want to see a dermatologist, you can expect an average wait of 38 days in the U.S., and up to 73 days if you live in Boston, according to researchers at the University of California at San Francisco who studied the matter. Got a knee injury? A 2004 survey by medical recruitment firm Merritt, Hawkins & Associates found the average time needed to see an orthopedic surgeon ranges from 8 days in Atlanta to 43 days in Los Angeles. Nationwide, the average is 17 days. "Waiting is definitely a problem in the U.S., especially for basic care," says Karen Davis, president of the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund, which studies health-care policy.

All this time spent "queuing," as other nations call it, stems from too much demand and too little supply. Only one-third of U.S. doctors are general practitioners, compared with half in most European countries. On top of that, only 40% of U.S. doctors have arrangements for after-hours care, vs. 75% in the rest of the industrialized world. Consequently, some 26% of U.S. adults in one survey went to an emergency room in the past two years because they couldn't get in to see their regular doctor, a significantly higher rate than in other countries.

There is no systemized collection of data on wait times in the U.S. That makes it difficult to draw comparisons with countries that have national health systems, where wait times are not only tracked but made public. However, a 2005 survey by the Commonwealth Fund of sick adults in six nations found that only 47% of U.S. patients could get a same- or next-day appointment for a medical problem, worse than every other country except Canada.

The Commonwealth survey did find that U.S. patients had the second-shortest wait times if they wished to see a specialist or have nonemergency surgery, such as a hip replacement or cataract operation (Germany, which has national health care, came in first on both measures). But Gerard F. Anderson, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, says doctors in countries where there are lengthy queues for elective surgeries put at-risk patients on the list long before their need is critical. "Their wait might be uncomfortable, but it makes very little clinical difference," he says.

The Commonwealth study did find one area where the U.S. was first by a wide margin: 51% of sick Americans surveyed did not visit a doctor, get a needed test, or fill a prescription within the past two years because of cost. No other country came close.

Few solutions have been proposed for lengthy waits in the U.S., in part, say policy experts, because the problem is rarely acknowledged. But the market is beginning to address the issue with the rise of walk-in medical clinics. Hundreds have sprung up in CVS, Wal-Mart (WMT ), Pathmark, (PTMK ) and other stores—so many that the American Medical Assn. just adopted a resolution urging state and federal agencies to investigate such clinics as a conflict of interest if housed in stores with pharmacies. These retail clinics promise rapid care for minor medical problems, usually getting patients in and out in 30 minutes. The slogan for CVS's Minute Clinics says it all: "You're sick. We're quick."

at our current rate of usage - it's basically a drop in the bucket.  And to get all the equipment in place to extract it and refine it would take approximately four years or more.

And that "desolate wasteland" is one of the last pristine areas left in the world.  Does man really have to desecrate every square foot of this earth to satisfy his own greed and consumption?  Guess so.