Maybe We Should Learn to Listen

Many people are disappointed because they don't believe that the president is doing what he promised in his campaign. When he was campaigning he told everyone that he was a moderate, but people all over the United States did not believe him. The people on my side, liberal/progressive heard "I will fix all the bad things that Bush/Cheney did for 8 years and make America the Center-Left Nation it is again. The people on the other side conservative/libertarian heard "I am so liberal and progressive that I will take away your guns, I will take all the money from the rich and give it to the poor, and I will be your worst nightmare. Obviously, neither side listened to him at all; they only heard what they wanted to hear.

The crises created by Bush/Cheney et al, called for a president such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the kind of man that has bags of charisma and a kick butt attitude, the kind of man who rolls up his sleeves and makes things happen. What we got was an academic like Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was a former university president and Obama was a constitutional law professor. Academics tend to study a situation and then make a decision. Obama is such a good speaker he made people believe that he was more like Roosevelt when in fact, he wasn't. He has a lot of good ideas and at some other time in history maybe he would have been much better, but at this time, with all these problems we have, we need more doing and less studying.

I think a lot of the things that should have already been done by Obama have been put on the back burner while he tries to get his agenda done. Once that is finished, I am hopeful we will see some of the fascist ideology, put into practice by Bush/Cheney and the Neo-Cons reversed. The big problem is that we have the "party of no" in the Senate that is blocking everything he is trying to do just because they lost. Basically, it appears that the order has been given out by the Republican leadership in the Senate to block every piece of legislation that is put on the floor by the Democrats. A democracy cannot function when an entire party becomes completely uncompromising.

Of late, the president has started to roll up his sleeves and get tougher and I am happy to see this as I am sure that many of you are as well. We will just have to see if he continues on this course and if it is not too late to ruin his chances for another term. We can rely on the Republicans to do everything they can to knock him down and keep him from doing his job to the best of his ability. We should be supportive of our president and help him to beat the Republicans.

Why are we Still in Afghanistan?

Why are we still in Afghanistan? Supposedly, President Obama in his speech scheduled for next Tuesday, will tell us why, and why we need more troops deployed to the area. According to news reports the president is expected to ask for as much as a fifty percent increase over the already 68,000 troops in theater. There are other rumors floating around that Mr. Obama will tell us about his exit strategy as well. I suppose after eight years of no exit strategy this is an improvement, but I would rather we just get out.

One would think with all the history of Afghanistan telling us that no army ever does well in the country, and most end up leaving after a long time and still not accomplishing their goals we would learn from that history and pull out. 1American diplomat and former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said on television that the Afghanistan experience is shaping up as startlingly similar to what happened to us in Vietnam; that it looks like a quagmire, yet he sees no way to avoid being mired yet again. Retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, who has written widely on military power and its limitations, says it's a war we cannot win. So why are we still in Afghanistan?

1The Baltimore Sun November 27, 2009 article by Ron Smith In Afghanistan and at home, we're being driven off a cliff

Health Care Reform Lies

I really don't like to re-hash things that I have already talked about on my blog, but this is something vital to our well-being as a nation, of course, I am talking about health care reform. Over the past couple of weeks I have been reading and listening to all the debate going on concerning this subject and have come to some conclusions. The majority of Americans get their news from television, and television media only says what their corporate bosses tell them to say. Newspapers are not much better, with very few of them willing to go against the corporate masters that put advertising in their papers. So, this leaves radio and the internet. Somehow, the internet has remained out of the corporate domain far enough to be the only real source of information one can believe in, other than those few brave liberal radio hosts that speak "truth to power."

One must realize the insurance companies and big pharma are not going to just let Congress support a government sponsored public option without a fight. They have known this was coming for years now and are prepared to spend billions to keep it from happening. They are afraid of the competition. They are already selling lies to the American people to squash support of a public option. You have heard the lies; "You don't want a government bureaucrat standing between you and your doctor." Of course, you have an insurance company between you and your doctor now, if you are lucky enough to have insurance. Or here is another one, "There are long lines in Canada to get medical care even if you have an emergency." This particular one is laughable, especially since there are lots of people in Canada who are trying to help us get single-payer health care, like they have, talking to newspapers and radio and on the internet, telling us that the insurance companies are lying to us. And here is another good one, "We in the United States have the best health care in the world." According to the World Health Organization, we are 37th in the world in health care. The real facts are that their are 37 industrialized countries in the world that offer health care to their citizens through single-payer or something similar and all of them but one have better health care than we do; another lie exposed.

The fact is my friends, we are going to have a very tough fight over the next couple of months and it's going to take commitment from all of us who care about the right of health care for ourselves and our families and the millions who are not covered by health insurance today. We absolutely need a single-payer health care system in the country and if we can't get that, then we need a public option run by the government. If we don't get it soon, for-profit health care will take us all to the poor house.