BRILLIANT!!!

Just so you know, I had to go out and find a special plugin to get this to embed right… but it was most definitely worth the 30 seconds of time.

Hooray! Kinda…

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/17/house.health.care/index.html

The bill won’t go anywhere with Democrats in the majority… but I don’t think the plan is good anyway (albeit better than the $1T plan the Democrats are pushing). However, the last bullet point, “Limitations on malpractice lawsuits”, to me, is the first step in getting health care under control. Reduce malpractice insurance to less than one-quarter (currently above one-half for some institutions) of upkeep and we’ll see a dramatic reversal in costs.

Reality sucks.

“Barack W. Bush”! [I promise I didn’t come up with that.] I think our president has finally hit a brick wall in his policies of appeasement and perhaps he is finally learning (albeit not fast enough) that simply being “present” in the U.S. Senate and being a “community organizer” doesn’t equate to experience and that running a campaign on rhetoric is quite different than running the free world on policy and ethics. It is true that no person can know what the presidency holds before sitting behind that desk, but I think our president was woefully under prepared and even unrealistic about the demands on the office… because in the end it is the office, not the person, that is most important. Somewhere between writing the executive order to close Gitmo and deciding that we can’t release photos of alleged abuse or even admitting that there exists some people so bad that we may not be able to give them trials; Somewhere in the void between telling America that we’ll have unprecedented transparency and passing a 1000+ page $850B bill on 12 hours notice; Sometime from announcing that we’ll cut programs from the budget to pay for health care reform to considering taxing those that get health care from employers as income and proposing a $3.5T budget; Somehow while going from saying “Yes we can” and “lets look forward not back” to blaming the former presidency for a $1T deficit and “broken” foreign policy all the while tripling the deficit and privately continuing those policies (while publicly proselytizing to foreign leaders); Somewhere among all of these stupefying reversals and missteps… our president learned that reality can never match his rhetoric. Lets hope that realization reflects his future politics and that he doesn’t continue to spend us into oblivion, weaken our stature, and destroy our competitive ability around the world.

About those tea parties…

“Let’s be very honest about what this is about. This is not about bashing Democrats. It’s not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea party was about. They don’t know their history at all. It’s about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up and is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks. There is no way around that.” –Janeane Garofalo.

It makes me sad, but I now have to stop watching 24 (unless they rewrite the series and kill her character). I suppose that is no big loss since the current season is riddled with technological stupidity and has a plot that seems like it was written by someone with ADHD off their meds… but still… it gave me something to do on Monday nights.

It doesn’t matter what you actually think of the so called Tea Parties, viciously attacking the people who attended to try to have a voice and tell the government that many American neither like nor approve of Obama’s endless spending thinking he’s justified by the handful of excessively liberal economists saying its a good thing (since when is the worst thing you can do as a govenment in a recession to “stop spending” – Regan??? Hello, are you out there?) is deplorable. I wish this was the only attack… but FoxNews (who paraded the protests around like they were armies marching on capitol hill) was the only network that had anything positive to say (if at all… the NYT didn’t even report the million+ people across the country – but “5 people in pink outfits within 6 blocks of eachother and you bet they’d have an army of collumnists and reporters there with a full front page spread”). Even the fairly moderate CNN reporters played down and instulted the protests. Like I said, it doesn’t really matter that you agree or disagree with the purpose of the protest, but don’t their voices get to be heard at least as much, and with as much dignity, as the people who want to save polar bears or raise awareness about “sea kittens”?

You’ve all read my views on Obama’s policies… so I’ll stop here… Except to say… the history of the Boston Tea Party wasn’t exactly complex and I think even us simple minded conservities can get a grasp on that one.