Category Archives: Politics

Politics is making my head explode, so I am watching cartoons

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It doesn’t get more stupid than this:

Glenn Beck’s attempt to co-opt Yom Kippur as a national day of fasting for the health of the Republic, a large, government-paid, medical providers’ sending scary letters to disabled and senior citizens, GOP’s sending out questionnaires implying that race will have an effect on who gets health insurance, the president’s heavy handed approach with the NYS gubernatorial race (I agree with the sentiment but not how it was handled), the ACORN debacle, FOX News’ orchestration of 9/12 march on Washington, leaking the CONFIDENTIAL Afghanistan report, the ideologues on both sides of the aisle in Congress not seeing that some reform is better than no reform . . . I could go on and on and on.

But, I won’t go on and on and on and on (today). 

I will go home tonight and watch cartoons on the PBS kids.  Because in the land of PBS kids, people learn to work and play and get along with each other.

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According to the Huffington Post, Bill O’Reilly Supports the Public Option

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According to the Huffington Post, FoxNews psycho-in-chief Bill O’Reilly supports the public option.

WHAAAAAAAAT?

I got nothing to say because my mind cannot comprehend and my mouth cannot speak and my fingers are about to stop typing. . . right after . . . .

WHAAAAAAAAT?

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Well, Kanye West acted like a jackass

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It is ok to poke fun at No Drama Obama for getting caught on an open mike.  Always a problem for politicians.  But fall-out and outrage at his comment?  Outrage is an outrageous response. 

And, “jackass” is better than George Bush’s reference to a reporter as an “asshole” or Reagan’s joke about bombing the USSR.

And, the truth is an absolute defense.  Kanye West deserves to be called an arrogant, impolite, egotistical jackass. So, Obama was tame.

Still it is fun to rib the President about the gaffe, but let’s not create a “Curser Movement”.

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I am worried about our nation’s appetite for change

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Franklin Roosevelt was vilified by the right for his policies.  Many didn’t work; some were even declared unconstitutional.  But what made him an effective president and leader is that he kept trying and tinkering with programs and policies until they had the intended effect.  You cannot be right always and certainly not in the first instance when you are in crisis management mode.  So, the trick is to retool, regroup and get the job done. 

What sounds good in Congress might not work in the real world.  So, we can’t be solely ideological; we need to be pragmatic.  Our systems are so large that a fix for one aspect of a problem has an unintended adverse consequence on another aspect of the same problem.

Let’s have a national dialogue on what can achieve together and not how the Democrats or the Republicans have failed.  The future of our prosperity depends on this.

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An Outsider’s Perspective of US (and Us)

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Yesterday, I spent almost two hours talking with a friend who is a businessman from the Cayman Islands.  He is in New York on business.  Since his business is somewhat US-dependent, he makes it his business to keep up with the news in the States.  He is a Libertarian and a pragmatist.  I am Democrat and (I like to think) a pragmatist.  We agreed on many things, such as the need to compromise and get incremental reform because it is a matter of conscience that people have affordable access to health care.  And I agreed with him that the public option will not pay for itself and should be phased in later if other measures don’t rein in the insurance companies.  We simply cannot afford to institute this option at this point, given the deficit.

We disagreed on two points.  The points of disagreement fascinate me. 

First, he thought that death panels could be read into the legislation because it was not expressly disclaimed.  My friend is an intelligent, well-read man; he is not Todd Palin.  So I had to think about this more.  Here is what I have deduced:

  • if a person distrusts “government” enough to believe that it would kill its own citizens, well, then you can make that argument. 
  • if a person doesn’t believe that our government would kill its own citizens, you might argue that the panel of experts represented a disguised government take-over of health care. 
  • if a person believes that our government is not trying to kill us and trying to cut down on defensive medicine by setting forth safe harbor protocols, then you think the concern is ill-conceived and politically motivated. 

I guess what I am learning is while I am firmly in the third camp, not all of the concern may be politically motivated.  Sarah Palin must have hit a chord with many, many people who have a deep, abiding distrust of government.  Hey, I was scared of government under Bush/Cheney, so I guess I have to be more open to the fear that this legislation unleashed.  Interestingly, it took my Cayman Islands friend — an outsider —  to help me start to understand the perspective of  blog commenter “Jordana”.  We still disagree, but now I understand that we may not be starting from the same point of trust.  That changes the dynamics of the conversation considerably. 

The other point was related to torture.  Some torture is understandable under some circumstances.  I have never met someone who held that view.  While I can see not prosecuting the CIA, I believe that torture is not understandable under any circumstances.  I don’t want to be tortured and I would probably make stuff up just to make it stop. So, I don’t see how it helps get to the truth.

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Obama’s Detractors will come up with anything

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Now someone says President Obama is gay.  It is clearly meant as an insult even though I thought that we had made strides in that regard. 

Because any man who is an intellectual, loves his children and seems to have a good relationship with this wife (at least from the outside) must be gay?  And, who cares?  Should we start talking about George Bush and his drinking?

So, you can’t fight him on the issues so you go for heckling and “disparaging” comments?  So, what if he is? So, what if he had blue skin or purple eyes? 

The right wingers can’t fight fair because they have no good arguments.  They only have their prejudices.

I hope Americans see through all of this and are disgusted by the absence of decency and fair play and calm discussion of the ISSUES.

President Obama, if you are gay, have blue skin or purple eyes, I don’t care.  I’m with you.

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The Shonda Chair has become a Couch

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What is SO crazy is that these ideologues get tripped up by the very things they rail against. 

Move over Governor Sanford and Senator Ensign, we need to make room for Mike Duvall, a GOP legislator in California on the Shonda Chair.  Maybe we need a Shonda Couch.

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By JULIET WILLIAMS, Associated Press Writer Juliet Williams, Associated Press Writer – 40 mins ago SACRAMENTO, Calif. – A pro-family values California lawmaker who resigned after being caught on tape boasting about his sexual conquests denied Thursday that he had extramarital affairs, saying “my offense was engaging in inappropriate storytelling.” Mike Duvall stepped down Wednesday after a videotape surfaced in which he was overheard telling a lawmaker about having sex with a lobbyist and another woman, including salacious details about how one mistress wears skimpy underwear and likes to be spanked. The 54-year-old Republican is married with two adult children. Duvall said Thursday his “decision to resign is in no way an admission that I had an affair or affairs.”

[text deleted]

The lawmaker had received a 100 percent rating from Capitol Resource Institute, a conservative advocacy group, for his votes on legislation considered pro-family during the 2007-08 legislative session.

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Say it ain’t so, Joe

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Joe Wilson, GOP Congressman from South Carolina, broke protocol by yelling at the President, “you lie!” when the President was giving his address to Congress last night.  Of course, this is the same guy who supports Sarah Palin’s assertions about death panels that will decide care for elderly.  

Look, I wish some people called out Bush on the false claims of Iraq’s buying WMDs and plutoniun from Niger in his speech to Congress, so maybe protocol breaches are ok every now and then.

The problem with Wilson’s outburst is what it lays bare for all to see: 

  1. the discussion of health care reform has become an exercise in name-calling and fear mongering;
  2. there can be no debate while people are screaming to score points with constituents; and
  3. the ideologues (on either side of the issue) will not bend to acknowledge the facts and realities “on the ground”. 

Ideology without common sense (and some sinister malfeasance, thank you, Dick Cheney) got us in the guagmire known as the Iraq War, where debate was stifled by fear-mongering and name-calling (“unpatriotic” was often used) and people afraid to be unpopular with constituencies that just wanted revenge (as in “round up the usual suspects”).

Trying to bring the likes of Joe Wilson into the bipartisan tent is a fool’s errand.  Similarly, if bringing in armchair “Progressives” into the bipartisan tent means clinging onto a public option come hell or high water, then close the tent flaps to them, too. 

Actually, let’s have both sides of the extreme ideologies in an arena and let them scream at each other.  We’ll sell tickets, televise it (and get advertising revenue) and the proceeds will help pay for health care reform.  We’ll call the show “Extreme Dysfunction”.

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Fox News, Shame On You.

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A friend emailed me that I should blog about Fox News Network’s being the only network NOT to air President Obama’s speech. 

Fox News Network: it was very classy move, really. 

Ok, it is so despicable that I can’t even write something merely sarcastic or facetious.  I know why people think that the owners and talking heads on Fox are evil.  Because they are.

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What is the fear?

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The minute President Obama took the oath of office, there has been a fevered pitch among white right wing radicals, as if somehow life imitated art and we elected the Manchurian Candidate.

Relax, everyone, Barack Obama is not the Manchurian Candidate.  How do I know?  Because George Bush was the Manchurian Candidate.  Think about it.  Whether you read the book, or saw either of the movies, George Bush bent to the will of his vice president (through Cheney’s own statements), a vice president who believed in torture and brain washing and who, as vice president, was able to wage war within the US and outside.  (Even the Manchurian Candidate had limits so we did not bomb Iran.  Thank G-d.)  During those 8 years, we fought a senseless war and muddled through another and let tinder boxes of Anti-American sentiment smolder and erupt.  The country was almost destroyed by catastrophic financial crises. The government put incompetent people in charge of disaster relief for its own citizens.    We survived the Manchurian Candidate. 

Relax, everyone. Give Obama the chance to do the things we elected him to do.

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