Good Monday morning to everyone out there. We had a nice sunny weekend and I did as little as possible. The snow that we were supposed to get last night into most of today has been pushed back to tonight and, maybe, tomorrow. But the accumulation prediction has been lowered as well. It has been one nasty year for snow, hasn't it. Wish we could send it to Vancouver which needs it badly. No, I am not following the Olympics except what can't be missed because it is on the news.

I found an interesting article at the New York Times this morning. I have been hearing and reading a bit about the debt crisis in Greece, one of the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Greece and Spain all of which have severe financial problems) and who that may affect the European Union. Evidently, Goldman Sachs helped Greece hide billions in debt from the EU financial managers over the last decade. If this didn't involve a sovereign government I think it would be called fraud. And, if I remember rightly, some executives at the now defunct Arthur Anderson accounting firm got jail time for similar actions involving Enron.

Huffington Post's Adam Geller has this story on health insurance. The news readers this weekend announced that Anthem had shelved its plan to raise rates for individuals 39%. At least for as long as the current furor lasts. I expect they will try to do it in some more stealthy way. There is only one way to make health insurance both affordable and widely available and that is to have a single payer system funded by everyone. The only way I can think of to do that is to make it a taxpayer funded system. Everyone in and on one out. But 'our' legislators are much more interested in serving their true masters--the insurance industry, the finance industry and any other industry big enough to shovel massive amounts of money into the system that gets the bastards reelected.