The moral puzzlement of ObamaCare

Company XYZ, a major business makes the deliberate decision to cut all part-timers' hours to under 30 per week so as not comply with the federal ObamaCare mandate. Is moral blame to be placed squarely on the company or instead on the President? Union ABC has always supported Obama and his policies but why if in this case it will make the country's underemployment situation worse? Great free-market questions.

I'm now in favor of medical marijuana

...provided you put it in pill or capsule form.  Isolate the main medicinal analgesic element in pot and put it in a tablet and folks will quickly lose interest in it as an issue.  You'd think we didn't have good pain management until weed came along.  What's Oxycontin anyway a pussy drug? it's good and all but you can't smoke it.  It's all about getting in touch with your inner Munchhausen, your purported bad back now gives you an excuse to go to the medical dispensary in states where this is legal.  Help your cancer management and alter your mind at the same time, the two work in tandem and that's the whole point.  Smoking medical weed as opposed to taking a pot pill is kinda like seeing a sex surrogate instead of consulting a textbook to work out your sexual problems and save your marriage - "I'm doing this for us honey."

Workplace malaise

I think it's time for a fresh blog.  Politically I can't latch onto anything at the moment and so I figured I'd do another work blog.  The workplace, it's been said companies and corporations have become more impersonal over the years.  Now I've had many jobs in my life, a quite varied resume but back in the day you were more like Family.  Most recently I've been getting over a severe groin pull and told my boss about it and even called out sick one day.  This is really a weird ailment because the pain is worse at night and in the morning but when you're active during the day you kinda forget it even exists.  Mild activity is better than staring out your bedroom window all day but anyway I took the one day and when I got back nobody really asked me how I was.  While everyone knew what the problem was because I told them and it's kind of awkward talking about your nether regions but no person in authority came up to me and said do you need some time off? not that I would've used it but it's nice to ask.  You know, concern.  Then there's the winter weather.  You could have 1 1/2-2 feet of snow and the place is still open and if you do call in there's a kind of weird silence on the other end of the line ("you mean you're not coming?").  Minor criticisms -- now I'm of the opinion that let's say you've put in 20 years at a place, they know your work product and on balance you're damn good and so one day some boss levels a mild criticism at you for whatever.  Nothing earth-shattering mind you but imo it shouldn't be brought up as the bulk of your work production over the years really outshines the minor bad and you do work through various ailments which people tend to forget so what's the purpose of the nitpicking point?  Oh yeah they're cutting back the hours on alot of people because of ObamaCare which I'm sure it's not Obama's fault and I ain't understanding the problem correctly.  I've got some years to go but I'm retiring the first day:)

OK so Florence Nightingale she's not

I found this item on the website of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network.  Since the TS Life & Hope Network is obviously an anti-euthanasia organization I just had to read about this incident but after reading it at least two times I came to the conclusion there was no pro-euthanasia motivation that I could detect on the part of the nurse involved or her place of work although I do think she and her facility were tragically mistaken.  I blame the lawyers.  At my workplace for instance one of the co-managers came over one day and we had a kind of impromptu meeting and the gist of it was if a customer is in need of some type of urgent medical attention just call 911 and leave it at that.  Attend the person in need but that's it, don't try to help them yourself so I politely said what if someone is choking on a chicken bone can't you perform the Heimlich?  I mean by the time the paramedics arrive and he said well ok but you have to be properly trained and certified in these life-saving procedures.  Well the reason he gave that you're not supposed to help the person in need besides calling 911 is your workplace can be sued later, YOU could even be sued if something goes wrong.  Better to sit back and do nothing and wait for the ambulance to arrive and just hope they're not navigating heavy traffic.  Again I blame the lawyers.  Interesting scenario though, a lawyer is choking on a chicken bone......

Advanced Obamanomics - the payroll tax

We just got a memo from Human Resources, the federal payroll tax holiday is expiring and they just went up 2%.  To use an example someone pulling in $300/wk. would have six extra dollars taken out.  Of course I'm not a member of the evil 2% and I know Obama is looking out for my middle-class interests.  Then there's the new health-care tax:)

Obamanomics - increasing the underemployed

This from Drudge - Denny's to charge a 5% surcharge to their customers and to cut worker hours to cover the increased cost-of-doing-business under Obamacare which come 2014 will be fully implemented.  Other companies are probably gonna follow suit and I hope BB considers this the next time he sits down to enjoy his Egg McMuffin and hash brown and morning paper.   Part-timers, the new norm.  Maybe Burger King can offer giant John Roberts soda cups as a thank you.

The 2nd Debate not quite the debacle of the first

I watched a good chunk of it the town hall affair of undecideds at Hofstra but wasn't familiar with the Crowley CNN woman as mod.  Obama was better but lately I've become distracted by Romney's hair, get a Wahl guide comb out please!  There must have been some polling done on the whole BC thing as Obama seems to feel very comfortable bringing it up, go social.  I was tired from work and all but Obama seemed to bring it up apropos of nothing really but it's predictable by now, when Obama feels a lack of confidence arguing the economy it's like he holds out his hand, opens it and says "look I have a contraceptive pill, I'm for it."  He brings up PP as if it's some kind of charity run by the Dalai Lama and a cross with Big Bird and you have to be evil to even think of defunding it.  Let me flesh something out here as there was the vaguest hint of a future ad-hominem by one of my more liberal commenters.  Um if I might parse something here I never said Sex is not necessary only that it's not medically necessary.  An orgiast and a monk can both live to be 102 and it's a philosophical thing to judge who is the happier but their bodies function just the same although the monk has his abbey ale to dull the pain.  Now BB and I are both pro-drinking and pro-pipesmoking but that doesn't make them medically necessary so there's a hell of a lot that Life has to offer but that doesn't make them critical from a purely medical the barest minimum to continue life POV (for the life of me I don't know why this is such a controversial point).  I think what it is is that Sex is such an integral part of human life that many of us feel that medical insurance needs to cover at least certain aspects of it and if it's not covered then by golly there needs to be a Law.  Look soap could pay for twenty free lap dances for me with a special visit to the VIP Room thrown in and my position would still be the same and I'd blog the same comments.  Logic doesn't change but for many folks we get into Icky Territory in a hurry when folks like Sandra Fluke want some aspect of picking up the tab for their sex'chal needs.  All of a sudden you have images of pumping buttocks and slapping scrotums whereas before you were quite tolerant because folks paid for their own lifestyle choices.  I myself would never think of billing my insurance company for some Trojans or making an issue of it with the Catholic Church.  Look if I worked as an usher in a church somewhere I wouldn't expect the local Bishop to reimburse me, wouldn't even cross my mind but that's because I'm not ideological and Obama and his supporters are.  Ideologues always have to ramp it up a notch and get you in line with their way of thinking and if Romney had any cojones he would have simply said on national TV pay for your own shit.  Anyway getting back to the debate Romney was strong as usual and had a good command of the, yes facts as when he pointed out Obama cut permits and licenses for drilling and energy exploration on federal lands.  Now Obama said no I didn't but if he were honest he'd simply say yes I care for the snail darter and Al Gore so it's like you always get sucked into your opponent's points instead of standing your own ground but at any rate it was a good show.  Obama's sexual socio/economic message -- when the economy sucks it's always PP+BC+RC which somehow you might be out of a job but I got ya covered, I'll hook you up:)

Faith & Politics

OR leave your Bible at home.  Been wondering though are liberal politicians ever motivated by their faith? and if so is this invalid too as when us Christian fundiecons do it and why is it never pointed out?  Gay marriage, equal pay for equal work, social justice, reproductive rights, low-income housing (desegregation), immigration reform, health care and the liberal list goes on but can laws or legislation to pass these things have a religious underpinning and do liberal politicians ever get motivated by their very own personal liberal understanding of faith to take action politically on these and other important matters?  So far nobody's sayin'  Sure there's politics in the Catholic Church but is Nancy Pelosi ever inspired in her House actions by her Catholic faith?  Certainly Martin Luther King Jr. was openly motivated by his faith and talked about it in marching for civil rights so that was a good thing but if a pro-lifer......well you get the picture.  Bibles, Korans, Torahs I don't care put it on the table and while we're on the subject does that old fragment of a papyrus paper show Jesus had a wife perhaps Mary Magdalene? and oh btw why do atheists use God's name in vain from time to time say when they're stuck in traffic?  Some new pro-Islam ads just went up in the NYC subways in some cases right next to the controversial ones about Support Israel and be against the savage.  This is the RIGHT way to handle speech you don't like - GET IN THERE!  I'm kinda tired of Tim Tebow wearing his celibacy on his sleeve, you can brag about your sluttery or your chastity and it's all the same to me and some woman's gonna seduce him and my other thing is if he's only the backup QB for the Jets why is he getting far more presstime than Mark Sanchez?  These and other matters feel free, coffee's perkin':) 

Maybe he had a fight with his wife

Cramps? or maybe Obama's strategy last night at the First Debate in Colorado was to keep his head down to make Romney look like he's picking on the black guy.  By universal acclamation Romney won the debate and even Chris Matthews said he was excellent.  Jeff Greenfield said Obama seemed clueless about the most basic political points and many feel Obama should have went after Romney on his 47% comments and Bain Capital.  Oh I know what it was he was depressed about that Samuel Jackson video.  The economy, taxes, job creation and education and Jim Lehrer as moderator, get the nachos out.  I don't get why Savage keeps calling Lehrer a baggy-eyed Bolshevik and other conservatives like Michelle Malkin hate the guy but at any rate Rom was up-tempo, controlled the direction of the debate and was aggressive this according to the Today Show which I popped on this morning because truth be told I deliberately surfed right past the debate on most channels but even here some new Chinese digital station was covering it from Beijing so I got some snippets in English.  OK so Romney didn't exactly speak as an arch-conservative and won't exactly win the hearts of the Ron Paulians, not even sure who they're voting for.  He denied Obama's $5 trillion in tax cuts assertion and said there's a place for government in health care, that's not exactly hardcore libertarianism.  Axelrod said Romney's was a strong performance but still a performance so that's one of them half-compliments.  Look Obama has very strong base support whereas Rom is going for the 7% swing, he's a swinger and Obama's a baseman.  O's weak performance won't affect his base of course, it was more embarrassment than abandonment.  Clearly though when Chris Matthews no longer gets The Tingle in his left nut something's wrong:)

When socialists can't find true love they fall for Obama

This is what I find fascinating.  Saty a self-avowed and proud socialist prefers the Dems and Obama over Romney and the Repubs.  That's to each his or her own individual choice of course but you would think a socialist would only prefer other socialists.  Socialist-minded folks in general seem to vastly prefer the Dems and Obama however over Romney and the Republicans.  Now if Obama is not a socialist and for the purposes of this piece let's say that he's not AND if the Democrats are not socialist as a party either then why do they the socialists actually prefer them?  It would seem to me the Dems and Obama are actually closer to socialism even if they're not actual socialists themselves else why would socialists like them so much?  Moving on......

Fire up the abortion machinery

So far for my money David Brooks of PBS' Newshour is giving the best commentary.  Cecile Richards daughter of the late TX Governor Ann Richards is now the president of Planned Parenthood and gave a brief speech and there was alot of talk all night about reproductive rights and gay marriage and Brooks asked San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro whether something weird was going on after all this was supposed to be economy night in an economy election and later said the Dems seem weirdly abstracted from the historical moment which is to say we're still in some kind of economic morass and they were quite deliberately focusing on those reproductive rights and gay marriage all evening.  Sandra Fluke of course spoke after 10 and hers was brief too, I'll at least give them credit for getting to the point and they seem to be more aware than the Republicans that the attention span of the average American is rather short.  Obama seems to have a strong socioeconomic message for the country-at-large and it is this: you may not have a job or a home but at least you can still get an abortion and get hitched to whomever.  Must be some weird vibe in the ether, first Clint Eastwood and now this.  The barn is burning and Farmer Joe is having sex with the cow.

So getting back to my original question if Obama is so not a socialist why would......

All things DNC - a running blog

I have to say I very lightly sampled the first night of the whole affair.  Honestly I hit the hay before Michelle Obama's big speech not because I hate her but I had to be at work by 7 to set up by myself and if they really wanted folks to watch it she would have been on at the top of the hour.  Look things aren't going well for them but the DNC is like a defense attorney, you have to say something.  I get that, it doesn't bother me and you can't expect them to be all walking around dispiritedly with placards saying WE SUCK.  Actually they did seem rather dispirited the whole night.  One guy was particularly pathetic and got into the whole class warfare thing (is that a winning formula?) and strongly implied Romney didn't pay all his taxes.  Nita Lowey is actually one of the richest members of Congress, did you know that?  There was alot of talk about women and heavy on the Goya.  Masturbating the base, dead fetuses and gay marriage but no real talk of the public debt which David Brooks of the Newshour said is what those independent swing voters care so much about that and economic growth.  Caught Harry Reid early on and in his speech I heard the phrase "some Tea Party ideologue" or was that my imagination? ho-hum and changed the station.  Kathleen Sebelius and health care, I think I switched over to Globetrekker.  Actually the whole night seemed rather boring and I was heavy on the channel-surfing.  I could have gotten more out of my evening by meditating on the grease spot on the ceiling, I mean Clint Eastwood may have been weird but he got people talking.  I was wrong though, I thought the Dems would hold more of a moderate convention but it doesn't appear to be so far.

Thoughts on the RNC Convention so far

I'm a heavy channel-surfer not one of those political nerds like Hannity who can name all the various Congresspeople on Jeopardy so what you're gonna get is my take on various snippets more to my liking like KY Senator Rand Paul's speech which was a good one even if he did milk Obama's "you didn't build that" remarks a little too much.  Condi Rice I thought was excellent, superb even especially in her comments on our entitlement and grievance culture and I saw John McCain on the floor telling the PBS interviewer that yeah there needs to be more of a discussion on Obama's foreign policy here.  I'm mainly sampling PBS' Newshour coverage beginning around 7 with Mark Shields and David Brooks and their generic political commentary and various guests like Newt and Rick Santorum and pollster Andy Kohut who said in his research some of the negative words folks used to describe Paul Ryan were "extremist" and "scary."  Funny but I tend to agree with soapster here, Ryan ain't no real constitutionalist radical he merely wants to give the federal budget a haircut, wants to streamline Medicare and Medicaid not get rid of them entirely.  He's not exactly gonna slay Leviathan but I like him more than soapster does what can I say?  Let's see what else?  Santorum talked movingly about his disabled daughter Bella probably offensive only to a pro-choicer and yeah the RNC paid homage to none other than Ron Paul but once they started showing that film about Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. I reflexively changed the remote to Sanford and Son.  I don't know how you can watch this stuff gavel-to-gavel, I guess you have to if you wanna churn out some nerdy blog.  They keep saying Romney has to open up to the country more as a person, discuss his Mormonism a little and Ann has already laid the groundwork with her charm offensive but that's the wisdom anyway.  The upcoming DNC Convention in September? that's gonna take a cast-iron stomach to sit through but if I'm to be taken seriously as a blogger than I have to sample at least.  My guess is that Obama is not gonna be talking alot about Bashar al-Assad even though his militias are killing women and children on an almost daily basis now.  That's not what they mean by a War on Women and it's gonna be kinda weird to see Dolan give the blessing at that thing:)

50 Shades of Crap

It's kind of a slow blogging cycle at least for me, nothing I could latch onto of late.  I mean yeah Sandra Fluke introduced Obama at some political function, he still seems to be milking that one and I was reading in my Catholic New York that he and Romney are gonna speak at the annual Al Smith Dinner in NY and...but hey wait a minute didn't his HHS Dept. and Sebelius just cause endless grief for the RC Church and other religious institutions? yeah a few lame jokes will smooth that over.  Maybe he'll even tell a birth-control joke or two, who knows?  Then I see the guy I'm actually gonna vote for, Romney, is actually a murderer according to some Super-PAC and this is just the longest hottest most horrible miserable summer for me in a while.  Getting attacked by mosquitoes practically on a daily basis even in my sleep and then there's the Fishbowl of Work to deal with.  Look folks are bored at work, I get it and maybe you have a temporary health issue or whatever and it makes for fodder and no it's not your paranoid vibe at work again, they really are talking about you and everybody else for that matter.  If I were in charge I'd make sure everybody has enough work to do.  New manager has a habit of sometimes leaving old food in the showcase like pulled pork so I talked about it with a co-worker and his attitude was give the guy a chance (the fruit of liberalism?), didn't seem to get my point like I was being a meanie.  Now I'm all for giving people chances, God knows I wouldn't be perfect in that role either and I'm not a prick but at what point is giving somebody a chance a lowering of standards, defining deviancy down?  I see Costco won't carry Joan Rivers' new book so she chained herself to a shopping cart and bellowed into a bullhorn.  Kristen Stewart/Rob Pattinson...you see the material I got to work with? but I'll be honest I kinda follow this stuff and I'm definitely on his side.  There was a new massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, they're not Muslims but they look like them and their faith system is very googleable.  I checked my e-mail just now and see I got like a hundred fresh comments, dunno what everyone is talkin' about I gotta go see.  Time for a fresh post, carry it on over here if you like.  I'll put the coffee on and get the crullers rockin'.  Had a couple of Jamaican beef patties last night, they're good and all but left a kind of slight aftereffect.  It's definitely time to plan the next vacation:)

The Politics of Tragedy

I hadn't actually planned on blogging about it today.  I had woken up early, got the percolator going, fed the cats and about 10 after 7 turned on the Today Show and Matt Lauer and saw the Breaking News.  We now know about the suspect, 24-year old James Holmes allegedly shot and killed 12 theatergoers and injured more than 50 others at the midnight showing in the town of Aurora, Colorado of the new Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises.  Holmes had no criminal history up to that point.  OK stunning and sad and tragic news to be sure but my blogpost could wait awhile, there'll be the usual suspects calling for more gun control about which more in a minute but that gestational post could give birth tomorrow or the day after at the latest.  So I'm googling this and I'm googling that so I finally say let me go to Drudge to catch the latest and see what we learned, any link to terrorism? and after a few seconds I find this:

ABCNews Already Linking 'Tea Party'? Backtracks...
Breitbart: Shooter May Be Registered Democrat

and I'm thinking what in hell does Politics have to do with any of this???  Now I realize Breitbart (not the ghost of Breitbart but now the generic Breitbart Spirit I guess) was trying to counter the Brian Ross/George Stephanopoulos thesis but C'mon!!!  Interesting though that ABC went with this so early, it's like a kind of Rohrshach or Word Association Test - Charlie Sheen/drugs, Mayor Bloomberg/soda, latest tragic shooting massacre somewhere in the country/Tea Party but it's all very disgusting.

Now gun control:  I'm not against all gun-control measures, pass them if you like but criminals are not apt to obey them in the first place since criminals by nature don't obey the law.  It'd be like saying because money-laundering and extortion are against the law the Mob won't launder money and extort it.  I never got this.  Gun control at most is only moderately positive, a modest step in the right direction but the way the libs get all worked up over it.  Yeah and banning the Big Gulp will makes us a nation of the svelte. 

Turns out this James Holmes character was enrolled in the University of Colorado-Denver and just dropped out of some PhD neuroscience program.  What's with these eggheads gone psycho? think Ted Kaczynski.  These tragedies seem sadly cyclic nowadays, also cyclic is the expected labeling system: Tea Party/gun control/fell through the cracks of the mental health-care system, the usual.  I had to use my own label "journalism" to categorize parts of my post here but I use the term loosely, looser than what my cat did on my cedar chest the other night:)

I kinda admire Romney at the NAACP convention in Houston

I didn't think he had it in him but he took it up the ass, ripped into ObamaCare and said how his policies are especially bad for African-Americans.  Of course everyone hooted and hollered like he just insulted Mother Teresa.  President Obama is so taking the black vote for granted and why shouldn't he that he sent Biden down there instead.  That'd be funny though if he said something stupid.  So when is it acceptable to criticize a black president?  I say when the jobless rate is still over 8% it's fair game and when a president is this weak liberals using the Race Card just looks plain stupid.  I'm not quite sure how Conservatism got linked up with the whole racism charge in the first place, didn't Charlton Heston once march with the Rev. Martin Luther King?  I read somewhere recently that Bill Maher has accused Matt Drudge of racism for constantly going after Obama.  I think with Maher it's not so much humor anymore, he's way past the Mort Sahl stage.  It's not funny or entertaining and now he's just venting a distorted anger, some chronic mental masturbator.  Put another way I'll take a Seinfeld or even a Jon Stewart.  Chris Brown and Drake fighting over a girl, I'm no fan of Chris Brown but it wasn't right what Drake did.  Now it comes out that Rihanna is into S&M and so maybe Chris Brown was confused when he hit her.  Fat uninsured folk, I think liberals are guilty of hate here.  Again kudos to Romney and he kept on rappin' too, I love it.  IF Romney does make Condi Rice the VP that's a heavy 2-fer, she's black and she's a woman.  Look sometimes you gotta counteract these things, it's not like somebody's gonna call her a house nigger -

right?

Last Tuesday's recall vote in Wisconsin

I didn't blog about it at the time the goings on in Wisconsin when Republican Governor Scott Walker was ripping public-sector unions a new one, I like to go my own way when I blog but as you all know by now Walker won last Tuesday's recall vote 53% to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett's 46% this despite practically every major union in the country making an all-out effort there to mete out justice and if you read the fine print about 1/3 of Walker's support came from union households.  His sins? he pretty much put the kabosh on collective-bargaining and public-employee workers now have to chip in more towards their pensions and health care and no more automatic deductions for union dues.  Before all this the recall of the GOP-controlled Senate also failed as did the effort to get rid of a conservative State Supreme Court justice and that was just a warmup for the Walker treatment.  So does this spell the death knell for unions? if there's enough Governors out there like Walker probably but I don't think the country is in as much of a union state of mind as back in the day.  For some reason when I think of unions I think of Jimmy Hoffa.

Over the past several years I worked with at least two young managers both men and it was quite obvious from their remarks they hated unions this despite our jobs in the food industry being heavily unionized.  So what was their #1 complaint?  I know when you talk about labor and politics the subject gets complicated but it was no more complex than when you have a union you can't FIRE somebody and let's face it in most workplaces there are definitely at least a couple of people who need to be shown the door at least this is the way the free market is supposed to work, better for everyone.  I can come up with at least two names myself right off the bat and so this is the #1 complaint even over and above fiscal concerns.  Good God have you been reading about the sexual goings-on between some HS teachers and their students in NYC? that's not even the point, sexuality has always been somewhat warped to begin with but it's existentially difficult to fire the tenured ones because...it gets complicated here.  There's a section on it in Glenn Beck's book Arguing with Idiots and ya gotta collect and collate your evidence first, get your witnesses and present your charges of course to this board or body or that and then all that has to finally go to an arbitrator at least some point down the road into the not-so-foreseeable future and even then the arbitrator for some strange reason often has a soft spot for the more pervy ones.  NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott would like the sole power to fire the truly bad ones but he has to lobby Albany first, that takes time and you know how that goes and the United Federation of Teachers likes the system the way it is after all they fought for it.  I don't recall this going on when I went to school as a young'en but then again we had nuns who'd crack a ruler over a student's knuckles so unless you were seriously into some S&M or a little clothespin action......

Pretty much in my place the only straight up reason you can fire somebody is if they steal something:)

The little irony of Obama's birth control mandate

Birth control or the oral contraceptive is not without its complications:

Does ObamaCare cover this?  Something tells me no and if not why not but if it did how is this saving $$$$$$?  A little feminist conundrum if you will, enjoy.

What this election is NOT about

- Osama bin Laden
- Women's lack of access to birth control
- Mormonism
- gay marriage
- Romney giving a gay kid a haircut
- Trayvon Martin/hoodies
- Stop 'n' Frisk
- Bain Capital

"Throw another log on the fire Cory"

The Obama Platform is what exactly?

I mean when things finally get down and dirty between him and Mr. Romney what is it shaping up to be or to put it another way why is it self-evident we should reelect the man? He can't run on the strength of his first term because there wasn't any at least that's not the word that comes to mind I'm sure even among his most ardent supporters. His main achievement would seem to be health-care reform and a majority of Americans are hardly behind him on that one so should he push it even if the SCOTUS strikes him down? He can always trot out of course the OBL Card but even here that video the news networks keep showing of bin Laden talking and the other one of him watching the boob tube wearing a wool cap looks like some B-actor out of a bad spoof (he found time to watch porn too?), too SNLish to have the gravitas of a world-master terrorist at work and maybe if I were the networks I'd keep it in the can. There's Obama's race to consider naturally and the nostalgia born from the historic and emotional moment of this country finally electing the first black president hasn't worn off and this is understandable, it was a good moment historically and it's like you want Tiger Woods back in the game. You can make the case that he played a major role in Khadafy's demise but even here he has been pretty much laid back on Syria and the regime of Bashar al-Assad. I believe at last count the death toll there of the citizenry stands like 9,000 or something so maybe when it reaches 10,000 he'll get off his duff. Taken as a whole, snowballing it altogether is all this reason enough for those who voted for him the first time to do so again? Of course for Shaw et al. it's a no-brainer but why would you not have a Democratic primary season especially when your main guy is so weak? My Dad who served in the Navy during WW2 and is as rock-ribbed conservative as they come said to me one day Hillary would've been a far better president than Obama. All you liberals out there make the case here because I'm not getting this one, it's way over my head:)

In a weird way I kinda agree w/Obama

Conservatives have said the President is "threatening" the Supreme Court on health-care reform but Obama is saying here in effect why are the courts the most powerful branch of the US government? Now I oppose ObamaCare myself especially the part about the individual mandate but I'm confused by conservatives' newfound love for the SCOTUS. I mean weren't tons of books written and speeches given on the Supremes having too much power over the will of the people on the various contentious social and political issues of the day Roe being the classic example of course but also affirmative action and so on down the line? When I went to the Mount in the Bronx and I always remember this in History class we learned and it was right there in the textbook that we have or are supposed to have 3 co-equal branches of the Government - legislative to pass the laws, executive to enforce the laws and judicial to interpret those laws, a kind of checks-and-balances system. I don't like the health-care but I find myself kinda agreeing with the President philosophically here. Apparently I'm in the minority though as usual:)