Inaction on Crucial Matters. President Obama has been absolutely inactive in the bulk of the platform on which he ran for, and won, office. The most important word in time management and efficiency is "while", meaning, if one thing you are doing isn't done, and will take more time, do something else in the interim. That's the way computers work: while one task is executing, another can be started, because there are delays in each process. So a single processor doesn't really do two or more things at the same time, but alternates, quickly, between them. The Obama Administration seems hung up on one task, getting healthcare reform done. And everything else just has to wait? Absurd.
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If you can't get healthcare financing done — and it might not happen at all this year — then at least get something else done. Only perhaps 10% of Congress is engaged in the discussions on healthcare. That means 90% are available to work on other initiatives. And there's plenty of work to be done.
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Where are the increased taxes on the super-rich? This is the way the deficit, which increasing numbers of people are worried about, can be brought down — indeed, completely eliminated. Obama needs to remember the wise words of Willie Sutton. He was asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, and that reporter quoted him as saying, "because that's where the money is". Many years later, he denied having said that, but that denial expressed the same thought in different words.

"The irony of using a bank robber's maxim as an instrument for teaching medicine is compounded, I will now confess, by the fact that I never said it. The credit belongs to some enterprising reporter who apparently felt a need to fill out his copy...

"If anybody had asked me, I'd have probably said it. That's what almost anybody would say...it couldn't be more obvious.

"Go where the money is ... and go there often."

There has been an extraordinary and hugely destructive redistribution of wealth upward, from the poor and middle class to the rich. This country desperately needs to reverse that hideous, evil trend, and redistribute DOWN, from the obscenely rich to the poor and middle class. The rich, in demanding lower taxes but higher expenditures on things that benefit them, and on a needless war in Iraq, have saddled the rest of us with massive debt that the servants of the rich deliberately saddled us with, by insisting on keeping government income lower than government outlays, as to pile up trillions of dollars of debt. Why? Because the rich OWN the debt. So not only do they not pay as much tax as they should, but the Government actually pays THEM, interest on the debt that they insisted the Government go into. And where does that money come from? The middle class, mainly, and from the poor in lesser measure, who are denied the money they need to live a human existence. This includes the working poor, who are forced to work for less than they need, and with few to no benefits, so that the rich can rake in higher profits. So the rich get the benefit of the work of the poor, while pretending that they are doing the working poor a huge favor by letting them work for slave wages. And of course the mere fact that the working poor make very little money does not exempt them from paying taxes. Some don't pay income taxes, but they pay sales taxes and excise taxes (on, for instance, gasoline), and their rents pay property taxes. So there is a vast transfer of wealth upward from the poor and middle class to the rich and super-rich, which has given us in recent years a distribution of wealth such as those in Latin American countries that we saw as a great evil not so long ago. Now WE are the evil we decried. That must change.
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The Obama Administration is not addressing that massive transfer of wealth upward but, quite the contrary, adding massively to it by extraordinary deficit spending financed by floating more debt, which the domestic rich and Communist China buy. The middle class and poor then send vast amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars of interest, to the domestic rich and Communist China! Obama's deficit spending is madness. The rich have the money. If you need money, go where the money is. Tax the rich, tax the rich, tax the rich!
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What about "green jobs"? Where are the initiatives to put all those millions of unemployed to work making this an energy-efficient Nation powered by renewable energy? Where are the jobs in the new economy he was going to move us to? What possible reason could there be for not acting on this? The deficit? I've already shown how to fix that problem, permanently.
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What about repealing "don't ask, don't tell"? How much difficulty could there be in doing that? We have wars and nation-building projects in which we need, for instance, language skills that gay men in the military have, but hundreds of them have been drummed out of the military just when we need them because of "don't ask, don't tell". Not only should all those men receive an apology, but they should also be made welcome to re-enlist, as to give us back the language and other skills (medical, for instance) that they would bring to the military. What excuse is there for not putting a simple repeal measure before Congress? That requires no budgetary outlay that would worsen the deficit. What possible reason could there be for not getting the 90% of Congress that is not wrapped up in negotiations over healthcare, to work on a measure that could be passed in one day?
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Where's the infrastructure repair that was going to put out-of-work Americans back to work? What happened to all those "shovel-ready" projects that would not be make-work boondoggles but actually provide needed maintenance and repair to bridges in danger of falling down and killing people?
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How about the Middle East? Obama talks about doing justice to bring peace, but continues to send billions of dollars a year to Israel, and $1.46 (a dollar 46) a year to the Palestinians. Israel owes us something like $100 billion in "loans" that were neglectfully converted to grants, by stealth. Make them pay us back. We need the money at home and in Afghanistan.
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On and on we go, seeing area after area that Obama is just not addressing, even when he has absolutely no budgetary excuse to offer for why he hasn't done what he said he would do.
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He wouldn't give us the single-payer healthcare — "Medicare for All" — that we expected. He wouldn't even use the phrase "Medicare for All", even after others had used it and it had elicited very favorable public reaction.
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Is Obama actually a stalking-horse for the rich and reactionary, sent to defeat genuine Liberals who were sincere and intent on really doing something? His desire to work in bipartisan fashion, even when the Republicans evinced a design to ruin him and prevent anything at all of a Liberal program from being enacted, is highly suspect. Obama's dealing with the Republicans as tho they were a legitimate political force entitled to respect has produced a nearly catastrophic drop in approval for Democrats, to the point where it presently looks as tho the Republicans will destroy the Democratic majority in the mid-term elections of 2010. Can this be an unexpected, surprise result of Obama's refusal to do anything himself? Or is that what he was SUPPOSED to do? Keep the Democats from doing anything with their big majorities long enuf to win for Republicans a return to majorities of their own in both houses?
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I suppose Obama's failure to do anything could just be a result of his fundamental weakness as a human being. He might just be a tragic figure, incapable of action. But Liberals have to wonder why a Democratic President can't get a Democratic program thru a Congress with Democratic majorities in both houses.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,367 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:39 PM

 
(Note: I have been very busy dealing with the annual Newark Arts Council's art whirl on my other blog, "Newark USA", so have neglected this blog for a couple of weeks. Only.)

Madness from Olbermann. I have decided never to watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann again, because he revealed himself in last nite's show to be an insane and rabid advocate of abortion-on-demand. Olbermann bitches that a principled Democratic Congressman, Bart Stupak of Michigan, will join with other principled Democrats to forbid Federal funding of abortions. Olbermann further complains that a revolt by anti-abortion Democrats could defeat the present drive for universal healthcare and thus cause the death of 44,000 Americans who cannot now afford healthcare. But exactly how many babies would be slautered if the Federal Government were, thanks to the new bill, to fund abortions? Fewer than 44,000? or more — even vastly more? If to save 44,000 people we have to kill a MILLION people, that is an insane deal, a figurative bargain with the Devil that the Devil offers to steal the soul of the Nation.
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Of course, there is no Devil. But nor is there any such thing as "abortion rights". This was an invention of whole cloth by a Supreme Court that looked at a Constitution that did not say one word about abortion all the while every state had laws against it, some since the 1820s. Suddenly, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that there was a Constitutional right of a woman to have an abortion, even tho the Constitution says no such thing and even tho laws against abortion had been in place for 150 years. The Constitution had never been amended to permit abortion; the people didn't want abortion-on-demand. But 8 individuals passed an act of legislation over 212 million Americans at the time, overturning 150 years of law without so much as one single word of the Constitution having been changed as to grant a right of abortion. That is called TYRANNY.
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The "justices" who found such a "right" should have been hanged — they should have become "hanging judges" in the best sense. Their unconstitutional legislation has killed some 49.5 million Americans. But that's not enuf for Keith Olbermann, nor the loathsome dyke Rachel Maddow, who want even more babies to be slautered for women's "rights". That is, today, a bizarre stance for a lesbian, in that a great many lesbians nowadays want to have babies, having admitted that the Radical Feminist clamor for childlessness as the better way to live was all a bunch of lunatic claptrap. Neither Olbermann nor Maddow as of yet has any children. They should both be forcibly sterilized, because they cannot be trusted with a child's life.
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The idea that Liberals should favor abortion on demand is one of the most bizarre, insane notions ever put forward in any sphere. Liberalism is supposed to protect The Little Guy from the powerful. Clearly, in the issue of abortion, The Little Guy is the fetus, the unborn baby; the powerful one is the mother. There is no issue of women's rights involved in abortion. None whatsoever. The time to "choose" whether to have a child is before pregnancy, not after. If the ball lands in the wrong slot on the roulette wheel after the bet has been placed, no one can be permitted to remove her chips from the table and pretend that she has the right not to gamble — after she has already lost her gamble. You gamble, and lose? Tuf. The time to choose not to gamble is BEFORE you place the bet.
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If a woman doesn't want to risk pregnancy, there are dozens of ways to prevent it, including The Pill, Jadelle/Norplant (long-term contraceptives that, for reasons not stated in the online articles I have seen, are not available in the United States), and tubal ligation (which is available here). A fetus is not part of a "woman's own body" but an entirely different human being, with a different chromosomal makeup, in temporary residence there. The mere fact that a boy baby can be born to a woman shows beyond question that the baby is NOT part of a "woman's own body", so the issue in abortion is not "control over a woman's own body" at all — a patently dishonest, phony issue — but killing a separate human being. For legal purposes, a mother is a stranger to a fetus, as is shown by surrogacy, when a baby that has absolutely no biological/DNA relationship with the host, is implanted in a biological stranger for temporary housing that amounts to exactly 1% of the current life expectancy of the typical American woman.
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The biological host of a fetus has no more right to kill that baby than has anyone else, so "equal treatment under law", the premise under which a "right" of abortion was found by the Roe v. Wade court, actually argues the opposite of a right of abortion: if a third party does not have the right to kill a fetus in the second party, neither does the second party have the right to kill the fetus. The life of a biologically normal child is NEVER at the disposition of the parent, be it mother or father, any more than it is properly to be disposed of by a third party, be it an individual or the State. That's what equal treatment under law actually requires: no right of murder for anybody.
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If universal healthcare means more abortion, then by all means let us defeat it. Let's just put it in terms that even Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow might understand: if we could have universal healthcare only if killing blacks or Jews or lesbian fetuses were required by the bill — or, say, invading Iran were an intrinsic and inseparable part of the bill — would it still be worth passing, to save those 44,000 'regular' Americans who now die from lack of health insurance?
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You don't do evil to do good. Killing babies to save adults is despicably monstrous, and people who think that is a good bargain need to be ignored. At the least. If public funding of abortions is provided for in the final bill, Rep. Stupak is absolutely right: any such healthcare bill should be defeated. So, Mr. Olbermann, where do you stand if insistence on abortion "rights" (that is, the "right" to take money from anti-abortion taxpayers to fund abortions they oppose) would defeat the bill? Women didn't need taxpayer help to get pregnant. They aren't entitled to taxpayer help to get an abortion, which they are not entitled to get under any circumstances (unless the baby is seriously deformed or retarded). So if you want to save those 44,000 Americans, you will have to agree not to steal taxpayer money to kill babies. And if your precious abortion-on-demand is more important than those 44,000 Americans, we will know how to regard you generally: as an enemy of society, not just of decency. And what do we do with such enemies? How about a little "retroactive abortion"? (Death penalty, artfully rephrased.) How can they object? "Abortion" isn't "murder", or "killing", so "retroactive abortion" isn't "capital punishment" either. It's all in the words, isn't it? Or is it?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,362 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:49 PM