MANY EXPERTS THINK NOT, but people are finding new types of satisfactory accommodation (or has this been going on for a long time?).

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Read more…

PATRICK MARTIN, WSWS.ORG |  1 June 2011

ANNALS OF FRAUDULENT DEMOCRACY—
The recent election in New York’s 26th District confirms what has been amply demonstrated in opinion polls: that the overwhelming majority of the population, including a majority of Republicans, opposes cuts to Medicare. However, this mass sentiment has no impact on the actual course of government policy.  In the week since the election, the American political establishment has thrown its weight behind an effort to put the genie back in the bottle and reinforce the political consensus in Washington that the Medicare program is unaffordable and must be dismantled to prevent national bankruptcy.

ONE WEEK AGO, on Tuesday, May 24, voters in the 26th Congressional District of New York cast ballots in a special election that, unusually for American bourgeois politics, was actually focused on a significant issue of public policy—whether the Medicare program, which underwrites health care for the vast majority of Americans aged 65 and over, should be phased out and replaced by private insurance.

The Republican candidate to fill the vacancy in New York, Jane Corwin, said she supported the plan put forward by Representative Paul Ryan to end Medicare. The Democratic candidate, Kathy Hochul, campaigned almost exclusively on her opposition to the Ryan plan and won by a comfortable margin. This was as close to a referendum on the future of Medicare as the unrepresentative American political system can provide. Read more…

By Stephen Lendman

Guess what: Wilhelm Reich was right. Frequent sex is mighty good for you. No wonder the closeted Hoover and the legions of repressed reactionaries and busybodies went after him with a vengeance.

By Cherry Trifle, SeXis Magazine |
Posted on May 28, 2011

I’ll say it right up front: I love quickies.

These days, even people over 60 can enjoy sex as often as circumstances will alllow.

Sure, I’d like to spend languid hours making implausible, mind-bending, wine-infused love on a gauze-draped bed in a fashionably modern South American boutique hotel overlooking the ocean—but you know, I’m busy.

Like most people, I have a laundry list of unglamorous crap to do—places to go, deadlines to meet. That said, a girl’s still gotta eat. And as far as I’m concerned, sex is as vital to life (in any worth-living scenario, anyway) as food. The good news? Unlike fast food, fast sex is healthy. It’s a quick burst of cardio amid your otherwise sedentary workday, a sultry endorphin injection that allows those pleasure-laden sensations to linger. Quickies generate an enduring buzz that renders one temporarily immune to the mundane and monotonous. Read more…

John Nichols | THE NATION |  May 10, 2011

House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan [1], R-Wisconsin, proposes to undermine the integrity of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, with an eye toward enriching the insurance companies that so generously fund his campaigns.

The American people are not amused [1]. They have sent a clear signal that they want to maintain Medicare and Medicaid.

And rightly so. despite the battering they have taken from misguided and malignant policy makers, the Medicare and Medicaid programs still provide the rough outlines for a single-payer health care program that keep costs down while expanding access to prevention and treatment for millions of Americans. Read more…

By Zaid Jilani

ACROSS the country, Main Street Americans are speaking out against a GOP budget plan that would effectively end Medicare.

In taking aim at Medicare, these conservative members of Congress are claiming that they are actually “saving Medicare” from financial ruin and that there is no possible choice other than to privatize the program and throw seniors to the insurance industry. They say this to justify a plan that the Congressional Budget Office says would have the elderly spending the majority of their income on health care. Read more…

By Martha Rosenberg, AlterNet

Posted on April 18, 2011, Printed on April 25, 2011

Can anyone remember life before Ask Your Doctor ads on TV?

All you knew about prescription drugs were creepy ads in a JAMA at the doctor’s office with a lot of fine print. Even if you knew the name of a drug, you’d never ask your doctor for it because that would be self-diagnosing and cheeky for a patient. Flash forward to the late 1990s when direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising, drug Web sites and online drug sales came on board, and self-diagnosing and demanding pills has become medicine-as-usual for the doctor/patient encounter. Read more…

By Joseph Kishore | 25 April 2011

The GOP front brigade. Criminals and prostitutes all, but the Democrats are hardly better. It's a systemic problem.

Democrats and Republicans are escalating their attack on government programs that benefit the working class, centering their focus on Medicare and Medicaid, the principal health care programs for the poor, disabled and elderly.

The Republican Party proposal, presented by Congressman Paul Ryan and approved by the House of Representatives earlier this month, would effectively demolish the two programs. For his part, Obama has just returned from a tour of the West Coast in which he trumpeted his own plan to cut $2 trillion, primarily from the health care programs, over the next decade. The proposal, still vaguely elaborated, would expand measures already passed as part of the administration’s cost-cutting health care overhaul last year. Read more…