[EDITORIAL NOTE: Today we inaugurate a new feature at TGB that will appear each Saturday - links to news items from the preceding week relating to elders and aging, along with whatever else catches my fancy that I think you might like to know about. Suggestions are welcome.]

¶ At the Guardian UK, Dean Baker explains how Medicare Part D, the prescription drug plan, is designed to profit insurance and pharmaceutical companies and “soak granny.”

¶ On the Op-Ed page of The New York Times on Friday David Brooks, with whom I rarely agree, eloquently notes the “political earthquake” represented by the Huckabee and Obama wins in Iowa.

¶ Chris Pirillo (the terrific tech guru who invited me to speak at Gnomedex last year) has been an advocate for elders' use of technology from his earliest days online. He posted a new video this week about some ways to help elders use computers more easily. Here’s the video. You can read the text at his video blog. (6:50 minutes)

¶ Only one of the current presidential candidates has a proposal for true universal health coverage; the rest would, instead, maintain insurance companies as middlemen. But as Stephen Crockett reports, there is already a House bill, HR 676, introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D - MI) that would expand Medicare to everyone.

¶ And if you don’t think that idea (or some form of universal coverage) has merit, consider the two new studies, reported in an editorial at The New York Times, showing how much health improves for those who finally get coverage after being without it.

¶ Paul Craig Roberts, who served as assistant secretary of the treasury in the Reagan administration and has since experienced a shift in political perspective to the left, has written Jane Harman and Liberty's Lost Light about S.1959, the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Act (the thought crime bill). Little by little, this dangerous legislation is gaining wider notice. (Hat tip to Darlene Costner)

¶ Another hat tip goes to Cowtown Pattie of Texas Trifles for turning me on to this interview with Lillian Rubin about her recent book, 60 On Up. I don’t agree with everything she says, but it’s an excellent and thoughtful interview. (56:41 minutes - from FORA.tv)