Obama, What a Putz

So I am watching the news tonight and I am listening to a story about how they are not airlifting any more Haitian earthquake victims who are critical patients to hospitals in the U.S. You see when the hospitals that the initial victims were taken to started to realize the cost of treating the victims, they asked for assistance from the federal government. The Obama administration then put a halt to any more Haitians being brought to this country for treatment. So let me get this straight. The Obama administration just gave a billion dollar contract to XE Services LLC, whom you may know as Blackwater. The company had to change its name because of the publicity surrounding the February 2005 unjust shooting of civilians in Baghdad. And seeing as our defense budget is larger than the rest of the worlds combined, you mean to tell me that this country can't pony up some money for the critically injured people of Haiti. That's a move a former Republican President would pull. The democrats are supposed to be the compassionate anti war party, so just what the fuck is this president thinking? What a Putz!

Sarah Palin

Been awhile, been busy, holidays and all. The fact is, its hard to keep writing unless you get the urge and I have the urge. Anyways Sarah Palin has a new book and a new job. I guess the idiots over at Fox News hired her so it would make Glenn Beck smart. So for someone who is so against taxes lets look at her record in Alaska. Her greatest accomplishment as Mayor of Wasilla was a 15 million dollar hockey arena. Lots of money for a town with an annual budget of 20 million. But it gets better as she OKs a bond issue for the project before the land had been secured. This lead to a protracted legal battle that ultimately cost the towns taxpayers to pay six times the original price for the property and the city had to in the end, seize the property using eminent domain. To pay for this she raised Wasillas sales tax by 25%. As governor she presided over a state that is first in federal spending per resident, though the citizens of Alaska are eighteenth in income taxes paid to the federal government. Who makes up the difference? We do, everyone outside of Alaska pays each of their citizens over 8500 dollars per year per to be spent their. It gets even better. Alaska has the highest state taxes per capita of all fifty states. So when you are watching her on Fox News and she starts spouting some bullshit about taxes and big government remember what you have read here. These are facts not soundbites from a brain dead hick that has no clue that there is a North Korea and a South Korea but that's a whole other story.

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.

Are you for gang rape?

Well I am back from vacation and thought it was about time to start blogging again. With the usual health care debate getting old I came across a story about an amendment, Senator Al Franken introduced to the Senate. In 2005 Jamie Leigh Jones was brutally gang raped by her KBR coworkers while in Iraq. She was locked in a shipping container for more than 24 hours to prevent her from reporting it. If you don't know who KBR is, its a division of Halliburton that was relocated offshore to avoid paying federal taxes after being given a no bid contract for services in Iraq by the Bush administration. That's right our tax dollars pay KBR and they avoid paying taxes back to the government, as in our government. But that's an entirely different story. Anyways Senator Al Franken introduced an amendment that would deny defense contracts to any company that required their employees to sign away their right to sue their employer. Iraq being outside U.S. jurisdiction and a signed letter saying she could not sue KBR has left Jamie Leigh Jones with no recourse against her attackers. Thirty Republican Senators voted against the amendment. These senators included John McCain, Saxby Chambliss, Sam Brownback, and John Ensign who is in hot water for payoffs to cover up a sex scandal of his own. I wonder how they would have voted if it was their own daughter who was raped? On a side note these same senators all voted to stop funding ACORN. This is a blatant example of partisan politics and shows the republicans are not thinking clearly at this point.

Health Care and Obama

I find it interesting that in a Wall Street Journal (Read: Rich Mans Paper) poll last week 63 percent of Americans want a public option and another 10 percent want a single payer plan. That's 73 percent of people polled are in favor of government run health care. This is a response by people who read the Wall Street Journal. I wonder what the percentages would be by a cross section of America. So my question is why is congress not following what the people they are supposed to be representing want? Could it be that the people of this country no longer have a say so in government because big business has bought their way into which laws get passed. Laws that favor big business instead of favoring the people of this country. Its a shame that this is what our country has become. Look at the collapse of the financial system. We the people bailed out Wall Street and a year later no regulations have passed either house. Wall Street is venturing heavily into risky derivatives again and giving themselves huge bonuses doing it. If Wall Street wants to do that with their own money then let them. The problem is they are betting with our money so they have nothing to lose. If someone gave you 10,000 dollars to place on red or black on a roulette wheel, you would have no problem doing it but would you do that with your own money? So getting back to health care, the preamble of our constitution states "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare". I take that as "we" being the government, in the form of our Representatives in D.C. should be promoting the general welfare by passing a national health care bill. I know that maybe a stretch but is owning an Ar-15 assault rifle the same as the second amendment which states "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". Think about it, it works both ways. By the way I am pro gun and have an Illinois Firearms Owners Identification Card. This was just a good analogy showing that it works both ways.

Well Chicago did not get the Olympics. There are many reasons we didn't. Such as the fact that our politics are hated around the world, which sucks because we give more in aid than anyone around the world to countries in need. Could it be the bribery scandal that reeked in Salt Lake getting the winter Olympics and bringing the IOC Chairman into our court system and making him look like an idiot. Could it be that South America has never had the Olympics there. I can tell you firsthand that Rio de Janiero is an awesome city, although they will definitely have to work on their transportation system. Whatever the reason, contrary to Rush Limbaugh, it was not Obama's fault that we didn't get awarded the games. I do think its interesting that for how patriotic the republicans claim to be, that they did not support Obama going over to Copenhagen to lobby for our country, and instead critisized him. My hats off to Senator Lindsey Graham for going out on a limb and saying to the fringe right wingers (Including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck) that Obama is a citizen, born in Hawaii, is not a Muslim and is a good man. When the people at his town halls started telling him these lies he diplomatically called them crazy. He went on to say it's time for the republican party to start policing their own ranks. I don't agree with most of his politics but I do hold him in high regard in that he has served a tour in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Unlike our former president who ditched his National Guard unit here in the states.