Thursday, May 21, 2009

Obama

Dear President Obama,

Welcome to the idealistic crossroads. It's a place many liberal AND conservatives find themselves once they have won the battle of ideas, and gotten elected. Sometimes, those things that seemed to morally repugnant to you while campaigning ... does not seem so bad. Take the most recent speech of the president's. Peel back the layers of ideological babble, and find ... nothing has changed. The Bay is still open, and you still have no where to store it's prisoners. It must have been such a disappointment when Congress rejected your idea of closing Gitmo and transferring the prisoners of war ... err ... men stuck there to American soil. You find that when it comes time to act, liberal principles quickly find themselves lacking. I know that it is much easier for me to sit here on my laptop and theorize X and Y, and pontificate about how I believe conservatism is the answer to our problems. The truth of the matter is, Mr. President, is that you know as much as I that sometimes we must do things that we find repugnant in order to protect the common good. I am not advocating this as the first response ... indeed, anyone who quickly steps in that directly should be seen for the monster that they are. But sometimes, when a principled people are confronted by men so thoroughly motivated by hate that all reason has deserted them, a more direct response is called for. I agree that torture is monstrous, and has no place in US policy. But sitting someone in a cell, while being tortuous, is far and above what they would do in opposite circumstances.

Truly, Mr. President, we are men of action. Lies do not become us. I understand that you must demean ex-President Bush for his actions in order to explain yours, and sometimes rightfully so ... but in this case I feel you should own your own actions. You now see why Gitmo was, and still is, an important instrument in our fight against al Qaeda. This talk of closing an effective strategy only emboldens our enemies. The only places that will take the men there are countries that we know cannot handle, willfully or otherwise, the men taken under their care.

**a rough draft, but given that his speech was today, I feel I should try and get it out ASAP. I will return to try and proofread later**

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Monday, May 4, 2009

More on Swine Flu

Let's look at the numbers, according to ABC News. LA County had 3 confirmed cases, with a population of 9.8 million (all pop. numbers are according to the CA website and are based off the 2007 Census). Ventura County have 4 probable cases, non confirmed, with a pop. of 798, 000. Riverside County have 2 confirmed cases, with a pop. of 2 million. San Bernardino County has 1 confirmed case, with a pop. of 2 million. That's 6 confirmed cases within a population of 14 million people. I don't even know how to compute that percentage. Why is there such a noise being made about this? The next segment, tied in with the swine flu story, complained about the mass of people who are storming hospitals with "flu-like" symptoms. Really? You think? Well, color me surprised. /scarcasm off.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

The Obama Web thickens

SO Crysler went belly up recently. This should surprise no one. Of course, no one probably even noticed, due to this "Swine Flu Pandemic". What a joke. I turned on CNN the other day, and the talking heads there were trying on masks. Are you kidding me? Less then 200 people have gotten sick from this "pandemic", and the only person to die was a Mexican baby who had come up North to try and get better medical attention. Out of the 304 million something people in the US, we have 150 odd people sick from something, and it's an emergency? I mentioned my minor outrage to a friend, and he told me that he'd rather it was an overreaction then an under reaction. That's fair, but it's going to be like the boy who cried wolf.

**Edit** At this point I was offered a delicious Sunday morning breakfast cinnamon roll. If there's a slight disruption of logical flow, I apologize, and blame the roll. **edit**

If the government, and the media, react this way to a non crisis, what's going to happen when something really dangerous happens? Are we going to become accustomed to this chronic over-reaction, and just assume it's the same non exciting event? Paranoids of the world have no place to be in my government, or my media for that matter. But to be fair, it stopped being my media quite a long time ago, and "my" government suffers from the same malady.

I was talking to a client of mine who is a nurse, and has been for quite some time, about what would happen if the government took over health care. She was adamantly against it. She knew someone in Canada, which has government sponsored health care, that had to wait 6 weeks for cancer treatment. F*ck that. Free crappy health care < expensive good care.