The Ever-'Present' Obama

Barack has a along track record of not taking a stand.

Finally and officially, Barack Obama is running for president. His symbolic announcement, in the Land of Lincoln, called for a new era in politics. Obama downplayed his thin federal experience while championing his record on the state and local level, and he talked about the need to change Washington, set priorities, and "make hard choices."

"What's stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics--the ease with which we're distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions," Obama said in his announcement speech. But a closer look at the presidential candidate's record in the Illinois Legislature reveals something seemingly contradictory: a number of occasions when Obama avoided making hard choices.

While some conservatives and Republicans surely will harp on what they call his "liberal record," highlighting applicable votes to support their case, it's Obama's history of voting "present" in Springfield--even on some of the most controversial and politically explosive issues of the day--that raises questions that he will need to answer. Voting "present" is one of three options in the Illinois Legislature (along with "yes" and "no"), but it's almost never an option for the occupant of the Oval Office.

Nowhere to Run....Nowhere To Hide.....

LOL

Maryville Univ. in St. Louis area cancelling screening of Al Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth' because of a snowstorm...

Nowhere to Run....Nowhere To Hide.....

A Waste Is a Terrible Thing to Mind

On Sunday Sen. Barack Obama, speaking at Iowa State University, made this jaw-dropping statement:

We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.

Wasted! Hard to believe anyone would say such a thing, but there it is on video.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports Obama quickly fired up the nuance machine:

Obama, in an interview with the Des Moines Register right afterward, told the paper, ''I was actually upset with myself when I said that, because I never use that term,'' he said. ''Their sacrifices are never wasted. . . . What I meant to say was those sacrifices have not been honored by the same attention to strategy, diplomacy and honesty on the part of civilian leadership that would give them a clear mission."

Aha, so this is what he meant to say:

We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and to which we now have spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans that have not been honored by the same attention to strategy, diplomacy and honesty on the part of civilian leadership that would give them a clear mission.

But instead of those last 27 words (which don't entirely make sense--e.g., "the same attention" as what?), what came out of his mouth was "wasted." Just a wee slip of the tongue!

The Sun-Times notes that Obama is sorry you took what he said the wrong way, which is to say, the way he actually said it:

By Monday, reporters covering Obama making his first visit as a presidential candidate in New Hampshire, asked Obama, campaigning in a Nashua home, if military families deserved an apology.

"Well as I said, it is not at all what I intended to say, and I would absolutely apologize if any of them felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they'd shown. You know, and if you look at all the other speeches that I've made, that is always the starting point in my view of this war.''

It's almost enough to make you doubt Joe Biden's oratorical standards.

Nowhere to Run....Nowhere To Hide.....

Do we want socialized medicine?

Problems with our health care system are leading some to fall prey to proposals calling for a nationalized single-payer health care system like Canada's or Britain's. There are a few things that we might take into consideration before falling for these proposals.

London's Observer (3/3/02) carried a story saying that an "unpublished report shows some patients are now having to wait more than eight months for treatment, during which time many of their cancers become incurable." Another story said, "According to a World Health Organisation report to be published later this year, around 10,000 British people die unnecessarily from cancer each year -- three times as many as are killed on our roads."

The Observer (12/16/01) also reported, "A recent academic study showed National Health Service delays in bowel cancer treatment were so great that, in one in five cases, cancer which was curable at the time of diagnosis had become incurable by the time of treatment."

The story is no better in Canada's national health care system. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based Fraser Institute has a yearly publication titled, "Waiting Your Turn." Its 2006 edition gives waiting times, by treatments, from a person's referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist. The shortest waiting time was for oncology (4.9 weeks). The longest waiting time was for orthopedic surgery (40.3 weeks), followed by plastic surgery (35.4 weeks) and neurosurgery (31.7 weeks).

Canadians face significant waiting times for various diagnostics such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound scans. The median wait for a CT scan across Canada was 4.3 weeks, but in Prince Edward Island, it's 9 weeks. A Canadian's median wait for an MRI was 10.3 weeks, but in Newfoundland, patients waited 28 weeks. Finally, the median wait for an ultrasound was 3.8 weeks across Canada, but in Manitoba and Prince Edward Island it was 8 weeks.

Despite the long waiting times Canadians suffer, sometimes resulting in death, under federal law, private clinics are not legally allowed to provide services covered by the Canada Health Act. Regardless of this prohibition, a few black-market clinics service patients who are willing to break the law to get treatment. In British Columbia, for example, Bill 82 provides that a physician can be fined up to $20,000 for accepting fees for surgery. According to a Canada News article, "Shortage of Doctors and Nurses Could Hurt Medicare Reforms" (3/5/03), about 10,000 doctors left Canada during the 1990s.

Some of our politicians hold up the Canadian and British nationalized health care systems as models for us. You can bet that should we ever have such a system, they would exempt themselves from what the rest of us would have to endure.

There's a cure for our health care problems. That cure is not to demand more government but less government. I challenge anyone to identify a problem with health care in America that is not caused or aggravated by federal, state and local governments. And, I challenge anyone to show me people dying on the streets because they don't have health insurance.

Anyone wonder what Iran is thinking now that N Korea is being forgiven for all of their past no-no's, and even being rewarded for coming to the peace table?

JDW

Kerry: "You know, education, if you make the most of it ... you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

It's Getting Better All The Time....LOL....as reported yesterday and two weeks ago......

Russert on the hot seat

Tim Russert has got some explaining to do. At the close of the Libby Trial on Tuesday, the defense indicated it wanted to recall Russert to the stand to impeach a statement of his. The life of a TV talking head tends to leave a lot of evidence of what one knows and doesn't know.

Russert had claimed that he didn't know that the special accommodations worked out by NBC lawyers and the prosecutor to allow him to give his deposition with his lawyers present and not before the grand jury was a special deal, and that he did not know that witnesses before a grand jury were not allowed to have counsel present.

I think this remark he made on the August 8, 1998 CNN Larry King Live show, will certainly be one of the impeaching statements the defense offers up:

RUSSERT: It's been suggested by no less than the former governor of New York the other night, that now that the president has decided that he's going to testify before the grand jury, why do it in the Oval Office and why insist that his lawyer be there.?
Go into the grand jury without a lawyer, like every other American citizen, go  ahead, ask me any question you want and I'll give you an honest answer.

Nowhere to Run....Nowhere To Hide.....

Anybody catch the latest left wing rant on Boston Legal last night? All about Big Oil and how we're killing ourselves by warming the globe. It was nice to know that much of what Alan Shore was talking about is a load of crap when it comes to climate change. Oh, and Big Oil is preventing alternative fuel methods. Really a joke.

Howard Stern gets his salary cut in half.

What a pud.