Meet the New Boss/Same as the Old Boss

That's what the band the Who was singing in the early 70s if I recall correctly. I will admit that I was a big advocate for Obama as I was looking for a change. Unfortunately Roger Daltreys lyrics are holding true today. In the next few blogs I will try to show how Obama for the most part has kept the status quo in Washington, but for today I will just be talking about Afghanistan. It is starting to leak out that Obama will be escalating the troop level in Afghanistan and the big announcement should be on Tuesday during a prime time speech. I know he said he would resolve the conflict during his campaigning, but liberals, as he was labeled, are supposed do do it through diplomacy, rebuilding infrastructure and aid. Why do you think the Taliban has regained such a presence there. Its because they are providing basics such as schools, hospitals, and money to buy goods and services. What we do is come in with weapons, occupying their country and telling them how they should lives without giving them any reason not to hate us. Think about it if you had them occupying our country in the way we are doing it to theirs we would have obliterated every last one of them. Some say were there for national security. This is horseshit. The 9/11 attacks were planned from Germany and the terrorists trained in our own country. Afghanistan is simply too remote to do anything but harbor them. Most educated people learn from their mistakes. Apparently Obama has not learned from the mistakes made there over the last oh 800 years or so. These people do not take kindly to outsiders. Genghis Khan ruled all of central Asia but could not break the will of the Afghan people. It was the only area in that part of the world he could not conquer. In the 1700s it was the one area the British could not colonize in that part of the world. And in the 1900s the Soviet Union conquered all of Clusterfuckistan except for you got it, Afghanistan. In fact the Soviets went broke during their 10 year occupation and it contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. Which brings me to this question. With the debt we have piled up, where are we going to get the money to pay for this escalation? June's bill was the latest figure and the U.S. spent 6.7 billion dollars, and that was before the escalation. Most estimates say it costs the taxpayer about a million a year for just one soldier in a war. That adds up to around 88 billion a year. Once again who is going to pay for this? I have a better idea. Since the average income in Afghanistan is only 760 dollars per year, why don't we just give them that money. It would add up to about 3600 dollars per person based on their population. We would leave, they would like us because we are leaving, and they would have the money in their economy to to do what is needed. Better yet why don't we just bring our troops home to protect our borders and spend that money in this country getting unemployment back below 10 percent. Just a thought.

What is wrong with government

I find it hard to believe that anyone takes Representative Michele Bachmann (R. Minnesota) seriously. At yesterdays impromptu rally on the Capitol steps that she organized with the help of Fox news, she was heard calling for a revolution and to scare members of congress into voting no on health care reform. So someone at the rally hoisted a large banner that showed bodies of holocaust victims, with the saying that this is socialistic health care. Meanwhile House minority leader John Boehner (R. Ohio) holds up his copy of the constitution and recites a passage from the preamble. He recites something about how all men are created equal with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The only problem with this is that its not the constitution he's reciting, its the Declaration of Independence. Now I don't expect the average Joe to know this, but one of the leaders of our country should. Idiots like him should just check out and go back to private life. Then I hear Carly Fiorina is trying to unseat Barbara Boxer (D. California) from her Senate seat next year. This is the same Carly Fiorina that ran Hewlett Packard. The same Carly Fiorina that layed off thousands of workers at HP while at the same time lobbied the Bush administration to let in more people in from foreign countries to work for HP. I guess she realized an engineer from India will work for around 30 thousand a year, while an engineer from this country makes about three times as much. Not only does she endorse shipping jobs overseas, she wants to replace the ones that are still here with low cost labor. So much for being patriotic. All this in a time where the average CEO pay has gone from around forty times that of an hourly worker to over four hundred times. Didn't she get fired from HP? Yes, and she left with a 20 million dollar severance package. If I get fired I wont get that, nor do I deserve that, and neither does anyone else. If your getting fired, it's because you have not done your job. Oh I forgot, people at that level don't get fired they resign to pursue other interests. Getting back on track, it is ironic that when the majority of this country wanted the Bush administration to pull out of Iraq his buddy Dick Cheney said he didn't care what the people want. Now the majority of people in this country want health care and Republicans are doing everything to stop it. Aren't our elected officials supposed to be representing us and what we want. Every poll taken with the exception of the Fox News poll shows that at least 63 percent of Americans want health care. Its time for our Representatives to start representing the people and not big business.