Comforting the Comfortable

MY DOG HAS TENNIS ELBOW

Brooks Hilliard: ‘My 10 year old dog was having a terrible time until I began giving her a half-human-dose of glucosamine daily. Amazing. She’s puppy-like again. If she could write her own testimonial, I’m certain she would.’

☞ Woof!

Chris Petersen: ‘We adopted an 8-year-old Springer Spaniel who clearly had joint pain. We started adding glucosamine-and-chondroitin to his chow. He’s now 10 and has the body of a 5-year-old. Since Archie does not know how to lie (or at least to lie effectively), I took this as evidence G-C works and started taking it myself because of discomfort in joints in my hands. It has probably helped as I have ‘forgotten’ about the joint pain I once had. (But we may have to wait until November to know for sure.)

☞ Woof! Woof!

CANCER IS NO EXCUSE

Not to a compassionate conservative anyway. Give it up for Jonathan Alter, whose column begins:

A Bankrupt Way To Do Business
They put huge deficits on plastic for our grandkids to pay. They sell us out to predatory lenders. They’re the Credit Card Congress.
By Jonathan Alter
Senior Editor and Columnist
Newsweek
April 25 issue

Let’s say Peter Jennings was named Jeter Pennings and instead of making more than $7 million a year, he earns $70,000, still comfortably middle class. Pennings has lung cancer, and he understandably wants the best treatment available. But his insurance company won’t cover experimental chemotherapy, so Pennings has an excruciating but familiar choice: he can charge the $25,000 chemo on his credit card or go without the cutting-edge treatment. If Pennings is like most people, he chooses to put his health first. With credit-card interest and late fees often totaling 100 percent a year, he’s now so deep in the hole he’ll never dig out. But under current law, he can file Chapter 7 and get on with what’s left of his life.

Not for long. Last week Congress sent a new personal bankruptcy bill to President Bush’s desk, where he will eagerly sign it. The legislation, which is designed to make it much harder and more expensive to get out of debt, is not all bad. With 1.5 million personal bankruptcies a year, some change was necessary. But this bill, like so many others moving through Congress, comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted. Worse, it provides for no distinction between those who get unlucky in Las Vegas and those who get cancer . . .

THE 13TH

Jeff Covey: ‘What happened on December 13, 2000 that would have marked it as ‘possibly the end of The American Century‘ instead of the 12th or 14th?’

☞ Al Gore’s concession speech . . . the beginning of a new – and I hope short-lived -direction for America.