Brown Shirts Steer Ship of Fools

     Again, major health-care reform is dead in Washington, D.C. This time, it died when the U.S. Senate adjourned for its August recess. Congress may yet pass and President Obama sign leg- islation labeled health-care reform, but it will leave big business in charge of our nation’s care with a system much like the sys- tem we already have. It can be pronounced dead at this point because of the same factor the Obama administration was aware of when it insisted on passage of a reform package before the August recess. And this August has resurrected the Nazi "brown shirts," just not the ones Rush Limbaugh points to.

Read more...

Health Reform Defines Parties

     Health-care reform legislation moving through Congress, still in the formulation stage, already is drawing out the classical political positions, making even more striking the increasingly sharp division between the two major parties. The friends of the Republican Party appear to see this and are moving quickly to take advantage of it early on in what is about to be a major battle. The friends of the Democratic Party do not and are about to get swamped, dooming meaningful health-care reform for at least another two years.
Read more...   

In Defense Of ‘Wise Latina Women’

     Nobody else seems willing to step up and defend Sonia Sotomayor for that now famous “wise Latina” statement and explain it, so we will. To wit: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experi- ences would, more often than not, reach a better conclu-sion.” Not only was she absolutely correct, the nub of what she was saying in that quote should be a major point of consideration anyone for the U.S. Supreme Court. Substitute for “Latina woman” any other descrip- tion of someone who has faced the exigencies of life that were never faced by most of the justices who have ever sat on that body and you would be absolutely correct.

Read more...

     Former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech before the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute brought to mind the themes of the 1964 movie, "Dr. Strangelove, Or How I learned To Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb." Then, and for the three decades following, the Soviet Union and communists in general were the central themes of fear-mongering in the United States. The movie moved the fear from a real “missile gap” to an imaginary “doomsday gap” to a fantastical “mineshaft gap,” all centered around the fear of the former Soviet Union and the “communist threat.” Change “communist” to “terrorist” and you have the fantastical “terrorist gap.” Quaking yet?

Read more...

Pelosi the Patsy Should Resign

     Nancy Pelosi should resign as speaker of the House. No, not because she knew about torture of terrorist detainees from the beginning. That’s the stupid part of this current dust-up. Her biggest sin goes far beyond the consequences of knowing about that shameful episode. The consequences of the big sin are being played out down Pennsylvania Ave. as she allows herself to be distracted and victimized by GOPcha. While she twists in the wind, Obama is about to continue a mistake she could have avoided by allowing impeachment.
Read more...   

      In his first three months in office, President Obama has revealed a major weakness that he needs to correct for the sake of future generations. He needs to drop the idea of “looking forward” at the expense of “looking back.” His most glaring lapse to date has been his indecisive flip-flop on what to do with those who authorized or carried out torture techniques against terrorism suspects in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001. Only by “looking back” and providing the same justice to the U.S. tortur- ers at all levels that we meted out after World War II against Germans and Japanese. Unless we do so, the United States will be seen as holding itself above the law applied to the rest of the world.

Read more...  

Obama's First 91 Days

     Every quadrennial at the end of April, America gives in to one of its major obsessive compulsive disorders, this one hav- ing to do with round numbers. You’ll see it on every TV station in the country—the first 100 days of the Obama administration. We don’t like that silly fixation, so here is our assessment of the first 91 days, or whatever. Mixed in is a “we told you so” or two. There have been several disappointments, but none that cannot be rectified later in the term. Given the enormous mess left for him to clean up when he took over the reins Jan. 20, the disappointments seem almost too modest to bother with. We have to give Obama an A for his first 90-some days in office.

Read more...

      With almost-daily reports of harm to the economy, dithering and delay are the mantra of Republicans in Congress debating the economic stimulus. Some made speeches reminiscent of David Stockman and Ronald Reagan and trickle-down econ- omics: Give the rich a tax break and in their generosity, they will spread the wealth to the lowest. That has not worked. It will not work, but Democrats in Congress have had to accept some portions of that argument just to get enough support to enact the stimulus legislation. GOP leader John Boehner said Presi- dent Obama's plan for the economy, with its enormous deficits to come, has to be paid for by the current generation's children and grandchildren. Where was Boehner when Bush frittered away a huge surplus left to him rushed and lied the nation into a trillion-dollar war in Iraq?                                        ---Veritas
Read more...
GOP Still Doesn’t Get It
     The Republican Party took a big hit in the Nov. 4 elections, all across the country and not just at the top of the ticket. Sub- sequent hand wringing within the party suggested there was a widespread realization the party needed a major change. Re- publican behavior since then shows the party still does not get it. From Nov. 5 on, Republicans around the country have spout- ed the same old lines they have always had, most of them Pav- lovian responses, led by the same old “tax cuts.” Choosing Michael Steele as chairman of the national GOP is not going to help the party change. It's still the party of Rush Limbaugh. Read more...

What Bush Left Behind
          The exiting Bush crowd, including his dwindling support- ers and apologists, spent the final days of the administration in one last attempt to put a favorable spin on the past eight years. He and Dick Cheney even attempted to move back the period through which a historical look at their failed presidency would be viewed. Historians generally agree that because of the emo- tions of the time and disclosures not yet made, a period cannot be judged honestly until about 20 years after the fact. Bush and Cheney kept mentioning 50 years for a reasonable look-back, no doubt because they figured most of us who lived through their mess would be dead by then. We look at what he calls one of his best achievements--Medicare drugs coverage.
Read more...  

Israel v Palestine: 60 Years of a Bad Decision

Bailout by Trickle-Up Gift Card

     The effort to correct the financial crisis in the United States has been largely ineffective, and for good reason. The people in charge at the top of the economic arm of the Bush administra- tion, but aided and abetted by similarly minded people in Con- gress, continue to focus on the top of the pyramid instead of the bottom. Gift card for a car, to pay of credit card debt, to pay off student loans, recover mortgage stability or to cover the cost of alternative energy sources or a variety of other “green issues,” and subject the gift cards to taxes, but couple that onerous re- quirement with a supplementary card in the form of a certificate of deposit, treasury bill or federal bond that would not be re- deemable for at least another year, to cover those who do not plan well for the extra tax burden of having thousands added to their tax bill the filing period after they receive the gift card.
Read more...

      President-Elect Barack Obama has given the first solid indi- cation he will attempt to take this country down the path we be- lieve to be the key to remaking America. He is beginning with a “killing two birds with one stone” solution to two of the country’s major domestic problems: jobs and infrastructure. Even before the first oil crisis in the 1970s led to an economic crisis almost as big as the current one, experts warned about our collapsing infrastructure, e.g., roads, pipes, wires, dams, bridges, tunnels, much of which needed to replaced decades ago. The infrastruc- ture is a looming crisis almost as big as the financial one.
Read more...  

The Favor Detroit Did Not Want
     Doubtless, the U.S. auto industry won’t see it this way, but Congress did Chrysler, Ford and GM a huge favor as their CEOs testified elsewhere on Capitol Hill. House Democrats ousted John Dingell as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. As we noted in Help the U.S. Auto Industry: Vote Against It the U.S. Auto Industry? Vote Against It, as chairman, and before that as a high-ranking member on the panel, the Michigan Democrat did grave harm to the auto industry by giving them what it asked for. What it asked for essentially boiled down to “help us fail to compete with foreign automakers.”
Read more...      

GOP = SOP: The Same Old Party
     The week after the devastating rejection of the Republican Party at American polling places, the Republican Party at all levels has been undergoing a self-assessment, a “what went wrong,” if you will. The upshot of what has been said by the congressional GOP leadership and would-be leadership, from the Republican Governors Association and from other party members across the country is: same old party. Apparently, they just don’t get it. It seems all they could come up with is something like, “We forgot to follow Reaganism.” That sounds just about it, except when one asks what “Reaganism” is, the response is all over the board.
Read more...   

The Dangerous Path of Executive Orders
      A disturbing juxtaposition of news items began this week as the United States began its transition of governments. The new government will behave as the old in at least one respect. And lay this one on the Democrats who took control of Congress and announced immediately (through the new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that there would be no attempt to impeach Presi- dent Bush. The Barack Obama administration apparently plans to take advantage of the executive order process Bush grabbed for himself. Somebody needs to put a stop to it.
Read more...