In the scenario you gave, the volcano god and his anger would be knowledge that is verifiable to the people that live there by the eruptions and lack of ability to know any better.

Man has had to go through these stages of knowledge being all that is available at the time and no way of acquiring the next level of knowledge at that time.

Lack of ability to know any better is the key to a situation like this. Once they had the ability to know better and chose to believe the past dis proven information anyway then they are "believers" and that is not knowledge anymore. At this stage it becomes tradition, superstition, stubbornness, political and social control, etc... But not knowledge.

If one just doesn't have the vision to see the next level of knowledge though and is ignorant because of this, that would be the part of the equation that gets messy. Is their own personal lack of vision their fault?

Debt Collectors in the E.R. and Delivery Room: Is Profit-Driven Medicine at a Breakpoint?
By Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz | April 25, 2012 | +

Imagine that you’ve brought your child to the emergency room and you’re revealing your most private health information to the hospital staff member at the desk, desperate because you fear your child’s very life is at risk. But the desk clerk seems more concerned about getting paid than giving care, and even makes veiled threats against your credit score if you’re not able to cough up the money to cover the bill.

Who is this heartless bureaucrat? Is it a hardened triage nurse? A bored clerk? Would you believe it could be a third-party bill collector posing as a hospital staffer?

Welcome to 21st-century American medicine. If you visit certain emergency rooms in Minnesota, Michigan or Utah — in at least 60 hospitals in the U.S. — the desk may be manned by bill collectors, who have been charged with getting patients to pay for care, sometimes even before they receive it.

Such bill collectors may also accost recovering surgical patients, demanding funds at their bedside. So far, there have been no reports that they’ve scrubbed into the operating room to collect money before anesthesia, but the allegations against medical debt collector Accretive Health revealed this week by Minnesota’s attorney general suggest that even that may not be beyond the pale.

According to the New York Times:

The tactics, like embedding debt collectors as employees in emergency rooms and demanding that patients pay before receiving treatment, were outlined in hundreds of company documents released by the attorney general. And they cast a spotlight on the increasingly desperate strategies among hospitals to recoup payments as their unpaid debts mount.

To patients, the debt collectors may look indistinguishable from hospital employees, may demand they pay outstanding bills and may discourage them from seeking emergency care at all, even using scripts like those in collection boiler rooms, according to the documents and employees interviewed by The New York Times.

Bloomberg reports:

Employees of Fairview Health Services, a nonprofit chain of seven hospitals based in Minneapolis, were required to use a computer system derisively called “Blue Balls” to track whether patients paid their bills and push for payment before they received care, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson said. The payment system began after Fairview hired the collection agency Accretive Health Inc. in May 2010, Swanson said in a report describing the companies’ relationship.

These tactics were allegedly used despite a federal law that requires hospitals to treat all emergency patients — regardless of their ability to pay. Responding to the allegations, Accretive said in a statement, “We have a great track record of helping hospitals enhance their quality of care. For example, we have helped over 250,000 patients get insurance coverage.”

According to company documents, Accretive’s bill collectors had access to patients’ health information, possibly in breach of federal privacy laws. The company’s employees may also have violated the law by failing to identify themselves to unknowing patients as collectors.

The Times reported that Accretive even targeted women in labor, saying that in July 2010 a manager urged staffers to “’get cracking on labor and delivery,’ since there is a ‘good chunk to be collected there,’ according to company e-mails.”

The alleged violations were first uncovered when an Accretive employee’s unencrypted laptop was stolen from a rental car parked in the Seven Corners bar and restaurant district in Minneapolis on July 25, 2011. The computer was found to contain personal identity information and medical records of nearly 23,500 patients of two Minnesota hospital systems — including highly sensitive data like HIV status, information about mental illnesses and social security numbers.

Minnesota Attorney General Swanson filed a civil lawsuit in January against the company for “failing to protect the confidentiality of patient health care records and not disclosing to patients its extensive involvement in their health care.” In a related press release, she said:

The debt collector found a way to essentially monetize portions of the revenue and health care delivery systems of some nonprofit hospitals for Wall Street investors, without the knowledge or consent of patients who have the right to know how their information is being used and to have it kept confidential. … Accretive showcases its activities to Wall Street investors but hides them from Minnesota patients.

Accretive Health is part of Accretive LLC, a private equity fund.

Is it at all surprising that Main Street continues to rage against Wall Street when it has shown such casual disregard for people’s lives — and when it pushes for profit while risking lives by reducing access to care? This sort of vulture capitalism is beyond unhealthy — it’s sick. Whether American health care can recover will depend on public pressure and outrage and on medical professionals recognizing that a health system that would allow a money-collecting company to bully its patients needs a complete moral and ethical detox — perhaps even a transplant.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland‘s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2012/04/25/debt-collectors-in-the-e-r-and-delivery-room-is-profit-driven-medicine-at-a-breakpoint/?xid=rss-topstories#ixzz1t73BXeJM

What?

Glad you agree but I do not consider it a laughing matter. It is a history repeating which means humans have not learned enough yet.

Oh yea, I expect that is right.

Anyway, still not a major drain on a tax dollar. Each program would be a mere 1% if that. And some of them are paid back by child support and other means.

I have heard the ponzi scheme thing from those who reject the idea of paying into a pool of money they may never access but I disagree as even workman's comp and unemployment are both the same. I paid into unemployment for many years and have never used it but I am glad the money helped others.

How Exercise Could Lead to a Better Brain

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Photo illustration by Clang
Photo illustration by Clang
Photo illustration by Clang

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By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Published: April 18, 2012

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The value of mental-training games may be speculative, as Dan Hurley writes in his article on the quest to make ourselves smarter, but there is another, easy-to-achieve, scientifically proven way to make yourself smarter. Go for a walk or a swim. For more than a decade, neuroscientists and physiologists have been gathering evidence of the beneficial relationship between exercise and brainpower. But the newest findings make it clear that this isn’t just a relationship; it is the relationship. Using sophisticated technologies to examine the workings of individual neurons — and the makeup of brain matter itself — scientists in just the past few months have discovered that exercise appears to build a brain that resists physical shrinkage and enhance cognitive flexibility. Exercise, the latest neuroscience suggests, does more to bolster thinking than thinking does.
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The most persuasive evidence comes from several new studies of lab animals living in busy, exciting cages. It has long been known that so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — lead to improvements in the brainpower of lab animals. In most instances, such environmental enrichment also includes a running wheel, because mice and rats generally enjoy running. Until recently, there was little research done to tease out the particular effects of running versus those of playing with new toys or engaging the mind in other ways that don’t increase the heart rate.

So, last year a team of researchers led by Justin S. Rhodes, a psychology professor at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois, gathered four groups of mice and set them into four distinct living arrangements. One group lived in a world of sensual and gustatory plenty, dining on nuts, fruits and cheeses, their food occasionally dusted with cinnamon, all of it washed down with variously flavored waters. Their “beds” were colorful plastic igloos occupying one corner of the cage. Neon-hued balls, plastic tunnels, nibble-able blocks, mirrors and seesaws filled other parts of the cage. Group 2 had access to all of these pleasures, plus they had small disc-shaped running wheels in their cages. A third group’s cages held no embellishments, and they received standard, dull kibble. And the fourth group’s homes contained the running wheels but no other toys or treats.

All the animals completed a series of cognitive tests at the start of the study and were injected with a substance that allows scientists to track changes in their brain structures. Then they ran, played or, if their environment was unenriched, lolled about in their cages for several months.

Afterward, Rhodes’s team put the mice through the same cognitive tests and examined brain tissues. It turned out that the toys and tastes, no matter how stimulating, had not improved the animals’ brains.

“Only one thing had mattered,” Rhodes says, “and that’s whether they had a running wheel.” Animals that exercised, whether or not they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice. Animals that didn’t run, no matter how enriched their world was otherwise, did not improve their brainpower in the complex, lasting ways that Rhodes’s team was studying. “They loved the toys,” Rhodes says, and the mice rarely ventured into the empty, quieter portions of their cages. But unless they also exercised, they did not become smarter.

Why would exercise build brainpower in ways that thinking might not? The brain, like all muscles and organs, is a tissue, and its function declines with underuse and age. Beginning in our late 20s, most of us will lose about 1 percent annually of the volume of the hippocampus, a key portion of the brain related to memory and certain types of learning.

Exercise though seems to slow or reverse the brain’s physical decay, much as it does with muscles. Although scientists thought until recently that humans were born with a certain number of brain cells and would never generate more, they now know better. In the 1990s, using a technique that marks newborn cells, researchers determined during autopsies that adult human brains contained quite a few new neurons. Fresh cells were especially prevalent in the hippocampus, indicating that neurogenesis — or the creation of new brain cells — was primarily occurring there. Even more heartening, scientists found that exercise jump-starts neurogenesis. Mice and rats that ran for a few weeks generally had about twice as many new neurons in their hippocampi as sedentary animals. Their brains, like other muscles, were bulking up.

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to see page two

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/magazine/how-exercise-could-lead-to-a-better-brain.html?_r=1&smid=FB-nytimes&WT.mc_id=MG-E-FB-SM-LIN-HEC-042312-NYT-NA&WT.mc_ev=click

Important for us to keep our facilities as long as we can....maybe

This reminds me of what our founding fathers were running from when they left their home along with the relentless religious dictatorship.

No, you just didn't know what you were talking about. Which is not a crime.

Where is the welfare and all that on the graph I so kindly provided? Showing where the federal tax dollars go. It is in the 4% listed as other.

Need A Cheaper Option Than Your State School? Try Harvard. Seriously.

A little known fact: As states cut higher education funding out of their budgets, state universities are becoming MORE expensive than elite, private universities. But public perception hasn't caught up with the trend. What's going on here?
Sara Critchfield More from Sara »
The annual Grapevine study of state spending on higher education finds that money allocated to state schools decreased by 7.6% this year — the largest decline in 50 years. The cuts varied from as little as 1% in Indiana to as much as 41% in New Hampshire because the federal money from the 2009 stimulus legislation is finally running out.

Please share this to raise awareness. And to all you cash-strapped aspiring college students — looks like your best bet might be to set your sights on Harvard!

http://www.upworthy.com/need-a-cheaper-option-than-your-state-school-try-harvard-seriously?c=to1

Again, we will dispel the lies early.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258

Connecticut Repeals Death Penalty

Posted: 04/25/2012 4:08 pm

Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) signed a bill into law on Wednesday that repeals the death penalty, making Connecticut the 17th state to do so. The new law does not apply to the 11 inmates currently on death row in the state.

Connecticut has been paying about $5 million a year to maintain its death penalty system, according to the state's Office of Fiscal Analysis, despite the fact it is rarely used. The only person the state has executed since 1960 is serial killer Michael Ross, who raped and murdered eight young women in the 1980s.

The repeal of the death penalty is expected to save the state $850,000 per year in the next two fiscal years, and the OFA estimates that that number will grow to $5 million in subsequent years.

"With Governor Malloy's action, Connecticut joins sixteen other states that have already concluded that the death penalty is too risky, too expensive, and too arbitrary to continue," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an advocacy group that opposes capital punishment. "By replacing the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole, Connecticut officials have reduced the risk of executing the innocent and freed up taxpayer dollars for other programs that prevent crime more effectively and better serve victims' families."

A majority of voters in Connecticut oppose the death penalty ban. Sixty-two percent of respondents to a Quinnipiac University poll said they support the death penalty in general, compared to 30 percent who oppose it and 54 percent of voters who said it was a bad idea to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life without parole in Connecticut.

"We have tried to be consistent in not saying much about polls because ... what's there to say?" said Roy Occhiogrosso, senior adviser to the governor, in a statement on Wednesday. "Polls come and go, numbers go up and down. The governor always does what he thinks is best for the state and the right thing to do."

A number of cash-strapped states have been reevaluating their death penalty systems lately as a way to save taxpayers millions of dollars annually. Illinois got rid of capital punishment in 2011, and California has an initiative on the November 2012 ballot to replace its death penalty system, which is estimated to cost about $184 million a year, with a sentence of life without parole.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/connecticut-repeals-death-penalty_n_1453331.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

Cheaper and smarter. You can't get any better than that.

Social Security is Strong

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April 23, 2012

A new report on Monday by Social Security trustees showed the retirement program's trust fund has $2.7 trillion in reserves and will grow to $3.06 trillion by 2021, enough to maintain the unbroken record of paying every nickel owed to every beneficiary in full for another two decades. Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation to strengthen Social Security and guarantee benefits for 75 years by extending the payroll tax that most Americans already pay to those who earn above $250,000 a year.

"The most effective way to strengthen Social Security for the next 75 years is to eliminate the cap on the payroll tax on income above $250,000. Right now, someone who earns $110,100 pays the same amount of money into Social Security as a billionaire. That makes no sense," said Sanders, the chairman of the Defending Social Security Caucus. He also chairs the Senate aging subcommittee.

Defend Social Security Caucus

Under the proposed legislation, the wealthiest Americans would pay the same payroll tax rate already assessed on those with incomes up to $110,100 a year. Social Security officials have calculated that the simple change would keep the retirement program strong for another 75 years. The legislation also follows through on a proposal that President Barack Obama made in 2008 when he was running for president.

The Keeping Our Social Security Promises Act is cosponsored by Sens. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Al Franken (D-Minn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), Barbara Mikulski, (D-Md.), Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D- R.I.).

Since it was signed into law 76 years ago, Social Security has kept millions of senior citizens, widows, widowers, orphans, and the disabled out of poverty. Before Social Security, about half of senior citizens lived in poverty. Today, less than 10 percent do.

"I strongly disagree with some of my colleagues who want to balance the budget by cutting Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs that are of enormous importance to seniors and the working families of our country. There are ways to address the deficit crisis without attacking some of the most vulnerable members of our society. As chairman of the Defending Social Security Caucus, I will do everything in my power to make sure that the promises made to seniors will be kept."

Social Security provides support for 55 million people, including 38 million retired workers, 6 million widows, widowers and orphans, and 11 million disabled workers. The most successful government program in our nation's history has not contributed one dime to the federal deficit.

http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/news/?id=F63D73C1-81DF-4DFB-AAC3-730092ED9406

Of course this will not stop all the lies about "entitlement" garbage and how it is using up the tax dollars.

Healing thoughts your way Mikey. Keep positive and take good care of yourself.

You do know this is a blog posted by someone of no merit/credit/verifiable proven unbiased researchable fame though right?

If you are going to believe something at least verify it in more than one place. I know I do. Especially since these blogger/trolls post untruths as though they are truths.

Wikileaks stuff was pretty verifiable.

Verify it.

But it makes sense that the right would want to believe this because they are rightfully, pun intended, losing their death grip on this country and need to justify to themselves that their hatemongering and fearmongering ways are still working.

If you can keep the masses believing that the only reason the "voting majority" which in the delusional mind of the right is themselves loses in elections is because the elections are stolen you can get them to believe just about anything is a deception even not believing it when their team is actually stealing elections like Bush did in Florida with the help of his brother.

Verify this crap or admit that it is just somebodies wet dreams in writing.

Really?

I always think of the first date as the see how it goes date and then the second as a make sure it was as good as it was the first time date and the third as the move into a more sure of things mode. I figure if he is on a date with me, he is interested already so the kiss doesn't signify that to me. But there isn't a right or wrong here, people are very diverse.

A man who describes himself as "nice" to me for the most part falls into the category of a passive aggressive man who uses his failures as a reason to take it out on himself and everyone else. I know there has to be nice men out there but they would never complain that their niceness is a problem because they wouldn't view it that way.

If a woman describes a man as nice to me, I take it that he is kind and polite. That does not come across as he is "the one" though.

No, I would prefer to wait until the third date, cause by then I know he really likes me.

First two dates are really to kinda get to know each other. By the third you know if it is worth the time and energy.

I don't go on looks so I can't get barely any info from that. Cleanliness and fussiness is about it from looks alone.

For first time since Depression, more Mexicans leave U.S. than enterPublished 1 hour ago

Washington Post

Tara Bahrampour
for The Washington Post
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A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans now leave the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.

It is the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent.

“I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s,” said Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project, which has been gathering data on the subject for 30 years.

Nearly 1.4 million Mexicans moved from the United States to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, double the number who came a decade earlier. The number of Mexicans who moved to the United States during that period fell to less than half of the 3 million who came between 1995 and 2000.

The trend could have major political consequences, underscoring the delicate dance by the Republican and Democratic parties as they struggle with immigration policies and court the increasingly important Latino vote.

Illegal immigration has emerged as one of the most emotional political issues in the country — one that dominated much of the Republican presidential contest and has proven complicated for President Obama.

Mitt Romney has courted conservatives with aggressive anti-illegal immigration rhetoric. But the GOP presidential hopeful has said in recent days that he wants to build ties with Hispanics, many of whom have chafed at his statements, and the new immigration trends could offer him a chance to soften his stance.

Obama has been criticized by immigrant advocates for stepped-up deportation policies that analysts have said were partly responsible for the decreasing flow of Mexicans into the United States. The trend could offer the president a political silver lining: The chance to take credit for a policy success that, his aides have said in the past, should persuade Republicans to embrace a broad immigration overhaul plan.

The reversal appears to be a result of tightened border controls, a weak U.S. job and housing construction market, a rise in deportations and a decline in Mexican birthrates, said the study, which used U.S. and Mexican census figures and Mexican government surveys. Arrests of illegal immigrants trying to enter the United States have also dropped precipitously in recent years.

Whether the reversal is temporary or permanent, it could have significant implications for the United States. The country has 12 million Mexican immigrants, and many work in agriculture and construction.

One in 10 people born in Mexico live in the United States, and more than half entered illegally. Most live in California and Texas; about 120,000 live in the Washington region.

The report does not specify how many of those who moved to Mexico had been in the United States illegally. But the statistics imply that many of them had been: The number of undocumented Mexicans here dropped from 7 million in 2007 to 6.1 million in 2011, while the number of those here legally increased slightly, from 5.6 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2011.

“The diminished flow appears largely to be a drop in unauthorized immigrants,” said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew and a co-author of the report. He said an estimated 5 to 35 percent of the recent returnees to Mexico were deported.

Although most Mexican deportees say they will try to return, their numbers are shrinking, too, the study said: According to a Mexican government survey, 20 percent of deportees in 2010 said they would not return to the United States, compared with 7 percent in 2005.

Half of those returning to Mexico took their entire families, including more than 100,000 U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants. Children born in the United States to Mexican nationals are citizens of both countries.

The drop comes at a time when overall immigration to the United States continues to grow, and reflects several factors specific to Mexico, including a relatively strong economy and a sharply diminished birthrate.

In 1960, a typical Mexican woman was expected to have more than seven children, but by 2009 that number had dropped to just over two — a decline that presages a sharp reduction in the number of young workers seeking to come to the United States.

As immigration reform continues to be a divisive political issue, experts on both sides of the debate disagreed over the implications of the report.

Those advocating for a path to legalization for immigrants here illegally said the plummeting of Mexican immigration should allow for thoughtful reform to take place without the pressure of trying to stem the flow across the border.

“It gives us the space to figure out how do we fix the legal immigration system so when the economy bounces back, how do we respond?” said Clarissa Martinez, director of immigration and civic engagement at the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy organization.

Others warned that the trend could reverse itself if the U.S. economy improves or the Mexican economy falters. “The idea that this respite means the problem is over is just jumping the gun,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for stricter immigration controls. “It’s wishful thinking by people who just want amnesty.”

But the era of entire villages moving from Mexico to the United States may be over, said Randy Capps, a senior policy analyst and demographer at the Migration Policy Institute.

Instead, he said, the current reversal may be similar to the reduced flow from Germany and Ireland a century ago. He predicted a negative feedback loop as fewer potential immigrants have connections to the United States.

“If this goes on for much longer, it’s going to take a lot to reverse it,” Capps said. “A lot of migration is based on networks — people who know people who know about the environment they’re going to be moving into. When the jobs disappear and the people you know aren’t there anymore, this channel of communication either dries up or it becomes so negative that it just changes everybody’s mind.”

Gustavo Velasquez, 38, who came from Oaxaca, Mexico, 12 years ago and serves as the director of the D.C. Office on Human Rights, said that the scarcity of U.S. jobs is causing more Mexicans to think twice about moving.

It is better to be unemployed in Mexico than to be unemployed in the United States, he said, because most migrant workers leave their families in Mexico. “They miss the warmth of being in a welcoming community,” he said, adding that with tougher border control and more deportations, Mexicans would rather be in a “precarious situation than in a situation of fear.”


Staff writers Stefanie Dazio, Carol Morello and Peter Wallsten contributed to this report.


That damn Obama, chasing all the migrants out of here. Whats next, improving the economy? Oh yea he already did that.

Hand Sanitizer Cocktails Send Teens To California Hospitals (VIDEO)
The Huffington Post | By David Moye
Posted: 04/23/2012 9:23 pm




Health officials are worried that teenagers will start drinking cocktails made from distilled hand sanitizer and mouthwash.
Hand sanitizer is supposed to kill germs, but some southern California teens are using it kill brain cells as well.

In the last few months, six teenagers have shown up in two San Fernando Valley emergency rooms with alcohol poisoning after drinking hand sanitizer, according to the Los Angeles Times.

This insane use of hand sanitizer has public health officials worrying that it's just the start of dangerous trend.

Hand sanitizers use a formula up to 62 percent ethyl alcohol to kill germs, but some students desperate for kicks are using salt to separate the alcohol from the sanitizer, and making a potent 120-proof liquid equal in strength to a shot of hard liquor.

"All it takes is just a few swallows and you have a drunk teenager," Cyrus Rangan, director of the toxicology bureau for the county public health department and a medical toxicology consultant for Children's Hospital Los Angeles, told the L.A. Times. "There is no question that it is dangerous."

Health effects from the drink reportedly include diarrhea, memory loss and even blindness and irreversible organ damage.

There have been only a few cases reported in Los Angeles, but Rangan fears the hand sanitizer highballs will become a larger problem since the product is cheap, easily available and the instructions for distilling it are easily available on the Internet, KTLA reported.

"It is kind of scary that they go to that extent to get a shot of essentially hard liquor," Rangan said.

This is just the latest over-the-counter product that teens have used in an attempt to get a buzz, joining a dubious list that includes cough syrup, vanilla extract and mouthwash.

In fact, at least two homeless people in Albuquerque, N.M., died after drinking a mix of distilled hand sanitizer and mouthwash, according to KASA-TV.

Police officials are worried that local teens will pick up on the hand sanitizer habit, so they have been asking local stores to move the hand sanitizer and mouthwash in hopes of nipping the problem in the bud.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/23/hand-sanitizer-cocktail-teens-hospital-california_n_1447611.html

What?

We have been arming the middle east for ages now, only the naive or worse not intelligent, would believe this is some kind of shocking news.

It is just another non story for the ignorant among us who buy into it.

Obama-Bush Stimulus “Saved Us From A Depression”: Arlen Specter
By The Daily Ticker | Daily Ticker – Fri, Apr 20, 2012 1:23 PM EDT

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By Bernice Napach

The country may be focused on the presidential election but former Senator Arlen Specter says Congress is the key to what happens to the U.S. economy.

"Regardless of who is elected president, if Congress is gridlocked nothing will happen in Washington," Specter tells The Daily Ticker. And there are many issues that require Congressional attention, including the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending reductions that will all take effect by year end if Congress does nothing.

Specter spent 30 years in Washington as a senator from Pennsylvania, most of them as a Republican. But after he voted for the president's stimulus plan in 2009 — "the single most important vote of 10,000" he notes — Specter switched to the Democratic Party, setting the stage for the end of his political career. He recounts it all in his new book Life Among The Cannibals.
Specter hasn't endorsed a candidate for the presidential election. He's critical of Mitt Romney's constant position shifts and says the former Massachusetts governor doesn't have a plan to revive the economy. But Specter says President Obama hasn't had much success with the economy either and should explain why he didn't follow through on recommendations from the Simpson-Bowles commission to cut the deficit.

Unlike Romney, Specter supports the stimulus plans of Presidents Obama and Bush which together injected about $1.5 trillion into the economy. Those programs "saved us from a depression" says Specter. Now he says it's up to U.S. voters to do their job come election day by choosing a Congress that will "take care of the people's business."

http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/obama-bush-stimulus-saved-us-depression-arlene-specter-172327300.html

Interesting.