Single Prayer Health Care - I Pray, but I Don't Get It

Medicare works well for my octogenarian father. My insurance premium is large enough - $1200 per month - for a new BMW and a new Mercedes. And I can't see the doctors I'd like to see.

My insurance is great as long as I don't get sick.

Then I'd face bankruptcy. What good is it? And One out of Six Americans has no health insurance and therefore very limited access to health care. This is appalling. It's the population of California, NJ and New York City. It's roughly the population of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland - the entire mid-Atlantic and New England states. It's 47 Million People!

Please call your Senator and your Representative in the House. Tell them to support a DFA Green Orca who runs on a campaign to deliver single payer health care and 100% clean energy in 10 years.

Will it be easy? No. But - When John Kennedy urged us to accept the goal "before the decade is out, of sending a man to the moon and returning him safely" he said it would be hard and expensive. Yet we did it.

When the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said "I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day my children will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" he didn't say it would be easy. He didn't say it would happen overnight. And he spoke those words about 45 years ago, about 100 years after Lincoln freed both slaves and the slaveholders of the bondage and oppression of slavery. And while last November a sufficient plurality judged Obama and McCain by the content or their character and not the color of their skin, we're not out of the woods yet. (How else do you explain people like CNN's Lou Dobbs? If his questioning Obama's birth is not racism I'll eat a whaleburger.)

We didn't know where Apollo would lead - other than to the moon and back. We didn't know it would lead to the Internet and tons of cool high tech. Unlike the Apollo program we know these twin goals - single payer and 100% clean energy - will have tremendous economic and national security benefits.

We can't afford the status quo. As Gore said, "we are borrowing Billions from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf and burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that has got to change." Coal, by the way, is dirtier than oil. It may be abundent, but it's abundently dirty

Let's turn those Blue Dogs into Dog Meat. And the Dog Meat Republicanista ...

Think about it - rotweiller and pit bull versus orca? No contest. Orca wins.

The Republicans - The Party of No

It started with Nancy Reagan who said: "Just say no to drugs."

The Republicans just say No to everything.

• No Support for the Unemployed.
• No Help if you're Facing Foreclosure.
• No Health Insurance for 45 to 50 Million Americans - about one in six.
• No Vision for The Future.
• No Understanding of Science.
• If you're a lobbyist, peddling influence and campaign contributions, "No, I'm not busy, come in."
• And if you're on Wall Street, No way you're responsible for your actions. You're too big to fail. The Government will bail you out. It's the American Way!

The Party of No!

The President v The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is supposed to be above politics. The President is not. The Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary braches of the United States Government are supposed to check and balance each other. Refer to the Constitution for details (here).

In his State of the Union address, President Obama criticized the Supreme Court and asked Congress for a law that will reverse the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. Obama didn't criticize the Supreme Court in a classroom, on partisan political ground, or in a closed session with Democrats. He criticized the Court in a non-partisan forum, in a televised joint session of Congress, in front of 6 members of the Supreme Court.

The way we can judge the substance of Obama's criticism is to look at the matter, "Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission, the decision, the majority opinion and the minority opinion. (Supreme Court Wiki here , SEC Analysis here, Independent analysis: here.) The Court, in a 5 to 4 decision that appears to be along ideological lines (Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, & Thomas, v Breyer, Ginsburg, Sotomayor & Stephens) in Obama's words "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections." Obama went on to say, "I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong."

I am not a lawyer, but I think the Supreme Court said “Corporations have the right to free speech, even if they make political advertising that is not factual.”

We will see what happens next.

Will the House and Senate enact legislation that reverses the Supreme Court decision or curtails the right to free and misleading speech by corporations?
Will this legislation be challenged in Court?
Will the Court that hears the challege agree with the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission or support the new law?

Meet the Senator and his Daughters

Massachusetts Senator-Elect Scott Brown, flanked by his daughters, Ayla and Arianna.

"Just in case anyone who's watching throughout the country, yes they're both available," Brown shouted.

As the crowd started to hoot - and a look of extreme annoyance crossed the face of daughter Arianna, and his wife Gail let out a mortified gasp - the future senator did his best to reel in his comment.

"No, no. No. Only kidding, only kidding. Only kidding, only kidding," he said. "Arianna... Arianna's, definitely not available."

"But Ayla is," he added.

Brown, the Senator-Elect and former Cosmo Boy, was also voted "Senator most likely to go 'hiking' on the Appalachian Trail."

Sarah Palin is looking to Brown to be her running mate in 2012.

This may be what happens when you legalize marijuana.

It proves that the once-blue state of New Jersey is not the only place where voters exercise bad judgment.

The election also proves that Dumb-ocrats fail to understand that in order to make policy, you have to be good at politics. Or just sexy.

Obama v Bush - Cheney, Happy New Era

In response to the Christmas Day attempted terror attack, President Obama's actions and former Vice President Cheney's comments highlight the difference between the two administrations: The Obama Administration investigates first. On 12/29/9 President Obama said it was a systemic failure (Christian Science Monitor). On 1/3/10 he said the attack was planned in Yemen (NY Times).

The Bush / Cheney Administration shoots first, ask questions later. In response to the Christmas Day attempted terrorist "incident" the former VP attacked the President and the Administration, but oddly enough did not condemn the attack itself (Politico)

I think Obama should send Cheney to Guantanamo as a special investigator. I don't think he should be sent to Kabul, Baghdad, Gaza, or S. Lebanon - those areas are too volatile, and besides, he already knows all the answers. That's the difference. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, etc believed they knew all the answers, and the answer to every question was either coal, oil, or war. Obama and his team know that these are complex developing systems.

In all seriousness, at first glance Cheney doesn't appear to know what he's talking about. Obama is not talking about closing Guantanamo and setting the incarcerated suspected terrorists free, he is talking about closing Guantanamo and putting the suspects in jail until they are tried in a court of law. (Politico).

Cheney bears an uncanny resemblance to the character of Senator Bob Rumson, played by Richard Dreyfuss, in "The American President," (IMDB)

the 1995 film by Rob Reiner (IMDB) starring Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd, Annette Benning, as Sydney Ellen Wade, an environmentalist lobbiest, Dreyfuss, Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox, etc. In a terrific monologue at the end of the film, President Shepherd says (YouTube)

"Being President of this country is entirely about character.

"For the record: yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. ... This is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights, so it naturally begs the question: Why would a Senator, his party's most powerful spokesman and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the Constitution?...

"You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free".

"I've known Bob Rumson for years, and I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it! We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only:

• Making you afraid of it and
• Telling you who's to blame for it.

"That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections.

"You gather a group of middle-aged, middle-class, middle-income voters who remember with longing an easier time, and you talk to them about family and American values and character. And wave an old photo of the President's girlfriend and you scream about patriotism and you tell them, she's to blame for their lot in life, and you go on television and you call her a whore."