Oh, I was reading it the way Jesse was: the rising cost of [healthcare and healthcare spending]. But I guess that doesn't make sense.

I'm reading it as two separate things. If she means the rising cost of both things, then "has" would be correct, and she might recast the sentence a bit for clarity. But I'm not sure how you get a rising "cost" of spending.

Oh, I was reading it the way Jesse was: the rising cost of [healthcare and healthcare spending]. But I guess that doesn't make sense.

Exactly the train of thought I was just heading down... Is it the cost of healthcare spending? Hmmm.

I say re-write the sentence! (I know it's too late...)

Oh- I think they were reading it like Jesse, and I was reading it like Amy! The whole sentence is a bit of a mess grammatically.

I say re-write the sentence! (I know it's too late...)

I think she should, to, and she did ask me to read it, but it is her opening sentence and I am sure she has slaved over it!

But slaving over it sometimes means you don't see the problems. If she gave it to you to read, I would let her know.

Fizzy water, the new fire!

Cass, may I pleeeeeeeeease tag this?

It is apparently 61° where I work. Gnarrgh. All I know is it ain't right.

Sophia, if she asked you to look it over, you should make the suggestion. She is always free to not follow your advice, right?

ION, what is up with the Huffington Post?

Huffington Post descends into creationist madness

Even in my more cynical moments I didn't think a premium progressive site like Huffington Post would give voice to a creationist nutbag. And not just any nutbag, a nutbag spewing the evolution-inspired-the-Nazi-holocaust garbage. Here's some of what my old buddy PZ, an actual evolutionary biologist, had to say:

I'll mention just one paragraph of this dishonest bunk.

Hitler's ideas, Dr. Berlinski carefully notes, "came from many different sources but no honest account will omit Darwin." A reading of Mein Kampf makes that clear. Certainly, Berlinski says, the men who formulated Nazi ideology "weren't reading the Gospels."

Here you go, a link to Mein Kampf on Project Gutenberg. Go to town. Search for Darwin — nothing. Or evolution — that is there, but only used in the sense of "higher" and "lower" organisms, and some bizarre notion that nature abhors crossbreeding.

It's one of the oldest and ugliest lies in the creationist bag of tricks: blame Darwin for the Holocaust. It's been debunked countless times. But waiting for creationist shills to tell the truth about anything is as foolish as waiting for a farm subsidies lobbyists to post objective nutritional data on corn syrup.