Time To Heal
I really don’t enjoy the election process. I understand it has to be done. I stood in line for an hour to vote and it was worth it for my young daughter to see that. The divisiveness, however, that the preceding months cause is unhealthy. The vitriol spewed from both sides is not good. So, congratulations to President Obama. I hope you try and walk across the aisle to work together with the Republicans. Nothing good comes from steamrolling your plans. I surely hope you tweak the Affordable Healthcare Act because there is so much in it that is bad and so much missing that is needed. Lastly, we, as a country, need to heal and leave the election induced anger behind. It’s time to move on and move forward.
The people have spoken–despite the vote suppression tactics. Let’s hope that the democrats (and Obama) meet the republicans in the MIDDLE of the aisle, then everyone can feel like they won something out of this clash of the billionaires. Maybe the winners will include the American people.
Yes, we must all work together. What happened during modern Republican times is that the corporate lobbyists bought everyone out. They trashed our anti-monopoly laws and got rid of all checks and balances on the banks and wall street. The mistake that Obama made in his first two years was to believe that the hard core Rebuplican leadership [read this puppets pulled by the strings of the big corporate lobbyists] would be willing to negotiate with him. They were not and he let them screw him into the ground. To thank him, the corporations simply sat on their assets and fired a lot of their workers to make him look bad. To rub salt into the wound, they refused to pass the stimulus bill to help create jobs.
The Republicans were the ones who had put two wars on the nation’s credit card bill and turned a surplus into a defect and then blamed our president The corporate lobbyists who pull all the strings are the “black hats” i.e. tobacco, oil, pharma, agribusiness, wall street etc. They all use the same lobbyists and MO which is to trash and burn anyone who gets in their way, and when good people complain, they just laugh and say, “Hey you caught us, now what are you going to do about it?. Our former surgeon general, Luther Terry, who was the first one to warn about the dangers of tobacco said that the only regret that he had in his career was to try to compromise with the tobacco industry.
Now that said, I do believe that there are many good republican common citizens who would like to see their party gravitate back toward the Abraham Lincoln way of thinking. I even saw a republican leader on TV last night who said that the party needs to put a stop to the trash talk from the extremists who are calling for an attack on our country by it’s citizens. The decent republican folk need to rise from the ashes and re-invent their party, and I will back them all the way if they do.
One more thought, the answer to our health care crisis is not to sit on our big fat butts writing out big fat prescriptions. It is to be creative like many big businesses are doing. For instance, Intel pays their employees to be in tobacco cessation, fitness and dietary programs and they get bonuses for results such as weight loss and some companies event check cotinine levels. We can’t just keep smushing handfuls of pills down the throats of our 350 lb diabetics and expect to stay solvent. Physicians have been just awful in their lack of effort to work our leaders to change the system in a truly meaningful way, and we have been even worse in that we have supported bloated medical societies who have pushed for the status quo
There is a lot that I would like to see changed in the president’s health plan, but it is a start. So work together? Yes indeed, but more importantly, LEAD, and lets get this to be the government of the real people again and not the corporate lobbyists who have done much more damage than the government has.
That’s an interesting proposition: Wall Street, big pharma, and every other capitalist entity seems to be the problem you would instead turn over to…Big Governmentand citing by name, Lincoln, the first president to use large-scale armed force against Americans to enforce the central will.
Who are these “real people” you cite, and at what point will you force them to accept the meaningful leadership handed down for their own good?
The lobbyists have done more damage than the government? Ignoring for a moment that lobbyists are a functional part of government, do you not see the imminent economic collapse that has been largely caused by Medicare? The government IS its own biggest lobby, and you want it more in charge
(And by the way, the stimulus was passed under total democrat rule, and and has produced no measurable improvement, only the supposition that “it would have been worse without it”)
I hope someone names you Surgeon General, if only to further hasten the collapse. You are the perfect spokesman for the post-American United States. By “we must all work together” you clearly mean “shut up and take it”.
Chances of anything good are slim and none—Lots of luck!!!!
Doug,
My response was based on the prior comments by you and Pat Nagle. With those having been pulled from the website, my comment is completely out of place and makes even me wonder what was in my diphenhydramine I took last night.
McConnell: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Taken out of context, this looks bad.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/when-did-mcconnell-say-he-wanted-to-make-obama-a-one-term-president/2012/09/24/79fd5cd8-0696-11e2-afff-d6c7f20a83bf_blog.html
But, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that” referred to your teachers, the roads and bridges allowing for a business to start and grow. Yet that little snippet served as the centerpiece for the first day of the recent GOP national convention.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/jul/18/context-obamas-you-didnt-build-comment/
I believe that fact-checkers, especially in this age of partisan-media (my opinion) are essential for culling out the WHOLE truth.