"Any American can get a job earning $30,000 a year."

This is the latest piece of nonsense spouted by Bill O'Reilly. Someone (not the Bush administration, who isn't interested in helping people get jobs or child care or education or medicine) needs to put O'Reilly in charge of healing the nation's poverty. His statement was not a throwaway line, an exaggeration, but something he repeated several times, with emphasis on any American.

There are a lot of Americans who would be really interested to hear this: People in small towns in which the major industry has gone out of business. People who have no job training. People who are partially disabled and just keep getting overlooked in the job market. People who have the wrong color skin. People who live in states (let's see--that would be all 50 of them) which are going bankrupt because of the the collapse of the economy. People who do not have enough money left to move their families to a new area and look for a job.

If you are going through bad ecoomic times, drop O'Reilly a line and ask him to refer you to one of those 30-grand-a-year jobs. He knows all about it.