BJean

Btw, Tiff you look gorgeous!

That's a new one on me. Haven't heard of Folicure before. I bought Nioxin shampoo, conditioner and styling spray. No help at all so far. I will try Folicure. Thanks very much for the tip. I'm glad to know that you're getting new growth. It's been awhile since I've been online here and last I heard you were still experiencing a lot of fall out. It's a pretty creepy feeling to have such thin hair.

I'm 7 months out and I agree with several of the others... don't worry! You'll experience more than one stall and if you just hang in there with doing the right thing, you'll have a good loss before you know it. Then you'll feel great and keep losing for a bit and then stall again. It's part of the process. I know it feels crazy when you aren't eating hardly anything compared to pre-surgery but there are these adjustment periods and there's not a lot you can do about it except keep on keeping on. And that pays off, big time. Now if I could just figure out how to get my hair growing again. I thought I was going to escape the dreaded hair loss problem but at exactly 6 months it started falling out and my hair is so thin now I hardly have any. OMG, Tiff does it ever start coming back?

The idea of relegating Lieberman to a cold dark basement is too good for him.

As obnoxious as some of the Republicans are, I wish we had some hard asses out front to not only sell the progressive agenda, but also to shoot down the ideology (read selfishness and greed) of the opposition! I think that most Americans got sick to death of this election and are all ready to move on. But if Democrats don't get some new way to market their people and ideas, they can probably forget it in 2012.

Well said, kartman. Well said. It is absolutely preposterous that we have become such short-sighted and easily incited voters. The tea party, Rush Bimbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and others have created an incredibly negative environment on the conservative side of politics and it has stirred people up into such a frenzy they aren't able to think logically about what supporting that faction really means to them. In theory, they think it means smaller government, lower taxes, free enterprize, jobs, etc. When in fact, it means just the opposite for middle income folks. And the extremely wealthy just keep getting richer and the poor get poorer. The middle class is getting hit harder and harder in their own pocketbooks. Why is it so difficult to understand that giving more tax breaks to the wealthy is completely contrary to cutting the budget deficit? And it makes it much harder on the middle class who wind up having to pick up the slack.

leroys, that's surely the truth. Cleos, we shouldn't be surprised at the election outcome. The one thing that Republicans are good at is winning elections even when it makes no sense that they should. They have (since I've been voting) willing to do and say anything to run down their opponents, even put out lies and swear they're the truth. It's ironic that the party that talks about religion and being Christian and wanting a theocracy, religion taught in schools, In God We Trust on our money, etc., when they've proven that it is the party of the most dishonest, dirty dealing politicians in the country. It's been this way since I can remember. I'm sure you were around when all the Nixon stuff went down. After that expose, they became even sneakier and even more dirty. It shouldn't work for them, year after year like it does. But voters want to elect someone who they think really will do the things that the Republicans talk about. The Democrats just come out with what they think is best for the country and they actually tell Americans what they plan to do. They think that voters are smart enough to understand - and some are. But mostly, Americans want something for nothing. They think that they can get what they need from the government without having to pay for it. They think that the schools are good enough, that medicare and social security should pay for themselves and they latch onto the idea of a government that is just taxing them way too much. And so it goes. It's depressing and even worse, it may get much worse. One way it could get drastically worse is if people keep jumping on the tea party bandwagon and actually allow Sarah Palin to become a serious candidate again. People laugh at the thought, but afterall, she was the actual vice presidential candidate 2 years ago. And the Republicans have shown what they're capable of in an election. They will stop at nothing to be in power.

I listened to one of the newly elected Republicans (actually an incumbent who was re-elected) and when asked what they're going to do now... are they going to go bipartisan and actually work with the president or are they going to continue to try to bring him down and possibly even try to impeach Obama? His response? He said, now we're going to work in a truly bipartisan manner because if we don't get something done now, we will be out the door in 2012. We don't have a choice if we want to get re-elected. We have to improve the country this go 'round. Frankly I found his honesty very refreshing -even though the truth of his comments is very depressing considering what we've put up from people like him over the past 2 years. :eek:

Not only that but we would have some control over the health and safety issues that relate to prostitution. It isn't as if having it be illegal has stopped it, right? So why spend taxpayer dollars to police the felonious activity and horrible health issues that surround the business of prostitution? It's a business that is as old as history itself. By making it illegal we believe we have divorced ourselves from having to think about or solve the problems surrounding the people who participate in this activity. But we are only kidding ourselves. It definitely impacts our lives. So it looks like the only chance we have of really controlling it is to make it legal and put some laws in place to control the aspects of it that wind up having an incredibly negative effect on our society.

I'll bet just about everyone who comes to Lap Band Talk has a similar story to tell about insurance companies controlling their health care. I've told mine more than once. And I've lived in Canada, one of the countries that has a system that so many Americans scoff at and fear. It was 15 years ago and it was better than what we have - even with their problems. People fear universal type health care for all Americans because they think it's going to cost them more money. The insurance companies love that because they are making countless billions on us believing the fallacies and blown out of proportion negatives about health care reform. Isn't that amazing? Mostly they have no experience with health care in other countries, but they cling to the idea that we have the best system in the world anyway. With all our own personal negative experiences coming out of the insurance run health care industry in America, we still fight change.... Interestingly, if you ask specificially what they're afraid of with this administration's health care plan, they recite the things they've heard that are generated by the insurance and pharmacutical lobbies, like robots.

ardelia, for sure that America has our home grown own brand of terrorists. We just like to put them in a bracket all by themselves. We call them kooks or crazies. We would never admit that the Bible thumping and the hell, fire and brimstone preaching they've heard all their lives has influenced them to have such a religious frenzy built up that they would bring down a building in Oklahoma City. No, for us, it's never about religion. They're just crazies. But for terrorists who also happen to praise Allah and carry a Koran, they're Muslim terrorists who aren't crazy, they're influenced by their religion. So we believe we should fear and shun all Muslims. Sometimes we Americans can be very naive and very ignorant. As for a mosque at ground zero, that's been proven to be an incorrect and inflammatory phrase: "mosque at ground zero." It is basically a non-issue manufactured to throw Americans into a tizzy in an effort to divert the attention away from some of the real issues. It's the kind of thing that helped forge the tea party movement. It's so much easier to jump on a bandwagon of outrage, especially when times are bad, than to work with your opponents to fix very difficult problems.

Yeah, right. This entire thing is very confusing. Right out of left (right?) field. It didn't make much sense in the beginning and it gets even odder as time goes on. :huh2: