Under attacks from the right and severe lack of backbone from the left, health care reform is starting to wobble on its feet.    While I remain a steadfast supporter of reform on both moral and economic grounds, the process is in trouble.    Between lies and half-truths being tossed by the Republicans in the face of reform and the Democrats inability to properly deflect them, the ship is taking on too much water and without some change will probably founder.    This should not happen.

I think it can be saved — and I think we can benefit from a good, solid bill that enacts real reform — but the President and his supporters must change course and tactics and must do it soon or however poorly-designed the arguments of the opposition may be the American people, and ultimately the support beneath the bill, will fall away into oblivion.

Get On Message — The White House must get their entire staff back on a single, solid, concise message.    Instead of coming out of the chute with guns blazing, this administration has sauntered into the park holding a bill on a platter and were surprised that they were attacked from the bushes.   Put on the battle gear, grow a pair, give out the orders to everyone on the team, and get marching in lockstep.     The message from the White House must be solid, without holes, and consistent.

Stick to Your Guns — Speaking of a consistent message, the President must come out on national television in front of Congress and say, “This is what we want for health care reform — points A, B, C.   Anything else, I will VETO — period.”    And he must stand behind that decision, no matter what the polls say, no matter how the votes appear to be swinging.    If you’re going to be bold, you have to stick to it or nobody will believe you, and right now, nobody thinks anyone’s really serious except the fear-mongers.

Public Option or Bust — The President’s punch list for reform must include the public option without it being a possible drop point.   It is the only way true reform can happen and everyone knows it.   Quit listening to the detractors and waffling on it. This is not a recipe for doughnuts, it’s health care reform.

The Buck Stops Here — President Obama must come out and state exactly how they are going to pay for reform, whether in the form of savings, taxes, discounts, or other means.    The numbers must be clean, clear, and understandable without an accounting degree.   He must stop skirting around the fact that in order to pay for this, people will have to be taxed.    We citizens are not stupid, and if you tell it how it is, we’re likely to back you, but you cannot hide from what is the truth.    If you’re going to sock it to the rich, then say that.   If you’re going to raise all of our taxes by a margin to cover everyone else, tell us how much.      We want to know the bottom line and then we’re likely to sign the check.

Go to the People — The President must engage the public media like he did during the candidacy and go on any newscast, talk show, and public media that will listen.   He must call a national address and engage all networks.    Taking along the solid, concise message of the first point, he needs to present it to the American people over and over, using graphs or videos or flowcharts or dayglo chimpanzees — whatever visual aids will help everyone understand the benefits and costs of health care reform and how it will affect them.     Almost everyone I know is confused and knows little about what this bill will or won’t do and that must stop. Everyone should be talking about it around the water cooler and we should all know the exact picture, whether or not we agree with it.

Tighten the Screws — Once all this has been done, the White House must then put enormous pressure on its Democratic base in both houses to perform and align with their message.   If that means calling every representative into a conference and having a Come-To-Jesus talk, so be it.    Stop the sound bites of Democrats waffling within their own swimming pool while the Republicans dance outside and point fingers — it’s embarrassing.

Stop Beating the Dead Horse — The entire Democratic party along with the White House must stop talking of “bipartisanship”.     It is worthless.     We all well know that most Republicans do not want to reform health care and therefore will at best water down the reform and at worst kill it, this sort of bill must not be signed with the least bit of dilution.

If Necessary, Go Down Gracefully — If, after all this solidarity, marketing to the public, demands of the Congress, and adherence to a clear principle you cannot get the votes, you can’t get them — simple as that.   This is Landmark Reform™ — it might not happen this round, although we need it desperately.    But the clear and simple way of ensuring that, if it dies, you will not be able to resurrect it for another 10-20 years is to waffle and cajole and weasel and compromise it into a small, weak shadow of its original intent.      Better to lose and lose big than to be decimated into pieces too small to put together again or, worse yet, to implement a bill that ends up being a drooling half-wit representation of Real Change.

We need to have health care reform.    I think most Americans want health care reform, but we all want it to be done correctly, clearly, and decisively.     This can and should truly be a huge turning point in our history as a country.

Usually I’m content to simply leave a short comment on each of Meghann McCain’s articles posted on The Daily Beast, but today I thought I’d write a dissenting opinion on my own blog concerning something that is very controversial around my area of the country, and that is gun control.    Meghann’s posting yesterday, “Why I Love Guns”, not only missed the mark in the argument about gun control but simply re-stated that which the Republicans and the NRA have been chanting for years.     It is one of the first time she has said something I disagree with, so I’m going to call her on it as well as find out where my readership sits on this issue.

Your “typical” NRA member seems to tout the gun line as, “I have a RIGHT to have a gun, any gun, anytime, all the time, and you shouldn’t ever stand in the way for me to have one.   If I or anyone else uses it irresponsibly, then that’s the breaks.     Just because there are crazies with guns doesn’t mean I should have a hard time getting my hands on one.   Their view of Democrats is, “You should NEVER have guns!   Guns bad!”     Liberals extol the number of gun-related deaths and the amounts of rednecks and nutjobs with firepower roaming around the country in Jeeps.

Let’s clear the smoke here, shall we?   Honestly — you’re all looking like idiots.    You, too, Meghann, and I’ve liked you from the start, but…whew.   Swing and a miss, dearie.

First off, the liberals do NOT want to take away guns.   Oh, sure, there’s some folks out there that want to eliminate them entirely from everyone, but those folk are about as prominent as the conservatives that think we should hand every kindergartner a Glock upon entering school for their own protection.   The vast majority of liberals simply want the following:

• much tighter laws and penalties to control gun sales and acquisition
• much tighter laws and penalties on gun storage, license, and usage

That’s it, really.   We don’t think guns, in and of themselves, are evil things, but an awful lot of terrible things have been committed with guns and it behooves us as a society to improve how we view and handle these potentially dangerous items.   By doing so, not only can we protect ourselves and others from improper usage, but we preserve the right of people to have and use guns because they won’t be viewed by the extremes as being terrible things.

I believe that anyone of a legal age (18) should be able to procure and operate a firearm.  I believe that the higher the firearm you wish to purchase the more checks you will have to go through in order to do so.   For a BB gun, you probably don’t need any particular proof.   For a shotgun, passing a safety course is requisite.    A rifle has a higher requirement, maybe a background check and a waiting time.    Handguns are even higher, incorporating the previous plus adding in long wait times, full background checks, and an extended safety course on handgun-specific safety, storage, and usage.   Carrying concealed is even higher, probably with poly tests and a psych eval.   Assault weapons are simply banned outright as they have no practical use whatsoever.

Does this sound harsh?   Perhaps, but we go through a similar scheme when getting a license to drive — learner’s permit, school permit, driver’s license (car/light truck), then you can move up to chauffeurs and eventually CDL and other heavy-truck licenses.    We don’t let an uneducated 16-year-old get behind the wheel of an 18-wheeler and neither should we allow a new, unknown gun owner behind the barrel of a .45 pistol without the proper evaluation and training.    This isn’t being exclusive, as the NRA would have you believe, but smart and preventative.

Is this so bad?   Why does the NRA fight something like this that sounds so…reasonable?   Am I missing something?

Although an Obama supporter, I am not one of the “Kool-Aid Clan” that drank the juice and now sees stars coming out of his nether regions wherever he walks.   No, President Obama is a man, a human, and a politician, prone to the same influences that all others are.   It is for this reason that I am disappointed on his stance on several issues, namely warrantless wiretapping, abortion, and the prosecution (or lack thereof) of the acts of torture that the United States has committed in its “war on terror”.

The fact is, we now have on record leaked memos from the Bush administration authorizing extreme measures to be used in extracting information, quotes from Dick Cheney about what sort of tactics were used on detainees, and probably the most damning evidence of all, the International Committee of the Red Cross report citing that the methods used on US prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay and other “black sites” around the world were, in fact, nothing but torture.

The ICRC is the independent, non-political group assigned to police nations for violations of the Geneva Conventions, the set of international treaties that determine world-wide rules for waging war and the treatment of such people as prisoners of war.     Essentially, the GCs were convened to hold all countries to some minimum standards of decorum when in conflict (personally, I think it’s hilarious, because why not just outlaw war?  That is another discussion, however.)

The ICRC report is quite easy to read and accessible, written in plain, understandable English — I’ll even post it here as a link:

ICRC Report on Torture

I urge you to read it, or at least some of it; the summaries are darn good bits, and reading even one of the types of torture used will set your hair on end.  The accounts of the acts done by CIA operatives and other personnel are…not pretty, but something we should all be aware of, because our country endorsed and used these on other living human beings.

These reports are never meant to be seen by the public; as you can read, it was addressed to the CIA and is marked confidential.   Thus the reporters have held nothing back in their evaluation of the true situation and what it means in moral and ethical terms.   It makes no bones about their evaluation of the treatment of the top 14 “high value” detainees, saying, “…the ICRC clearly considers that the allegations of the fourteen include descriptions of treatment and interrogation techniques — singly or in combination — that amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”    This is nothing less than a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions by the United States government.

And I’d like something to be done about it.

So far, Spain is on the ball and has already started working on prosecuting six Bush-administration officials for their involvement in authorizing torture tactics, but why should we wait for other countries to do our dirty work?    You can be assured that Europe has far less to lose if they choose to prosecute the people involved in this than we do, but don’t we, the people, care enough to deal with this ourselves?  Does the new administration not know what has happened and that they have a responsibility to find those guilty and to prosecute them for their crimes?

Of course they do — they’re just avoiding it because it’ll burn up HUGE amounts of political capital, especially with the far Right.     There’s always been a bit of a precedent to avoid such mole-whackings of the previous administration, even to the point of pardoning the whole messy system (hellooooo, Nixon?).    I do not think that we should let this one slide into the past without even a whimper, however.    So far, Attorney General Eric Holder has been rather mute on the issue, dodging the central question of torture prosecutions, despite saying during his confirmation that he did not agree with the tactics and that it should be punished.     And fair enough, he’s just getting started, but…we’re waiting.   And we don’t want to be kept waiting forever.

Change is not always easy.    It oftentimes pisses people off and makes enemies.    Change can be hard, stressful, cumbersome.    You might end up making just as big of a mess from performing change as you started with, or even worse.   But on this note, we cannot let falter — the United States, the American people, are not torturers and we do not stand for that sort of behavior.    We must redeem ourselves in the world’s eyes as well as our own, for how can we face our children and say we did the right thing if we sweep this under the rug?

It will be hard and difficult and painful, but it must be done.    Please, President Obama, prosecute the perpetrators of torture.    And please, American public, support the effort.    We can do better, and we should.   Pay the bill and bring those to bear for their heinous acts — please.

Meghann McCain wrote an article today on The Daily Beast entitled, “What I Learned from the Democrats” wherein she detailed what lessons can be learned from the party of donkey by the party of elephant in their pursuit to find a clearer path in the party.

First, I think Meghann is one of the clearest, cleanest voices in the GOP today.   There is a lot of ‘noise’ in the party line and it’s nice to hear someone coming up with sensible, cautioned opinions about what’s going on and more importantly, what to do about it, which does not seem to be a point on any Republican powerpoint presentation today.

I do debate the idea that the Republicans are showing party unity right now.   They may have shown unity during the Bush years, mostly by not saying anything against what Bush was doing with his policies, but nowadays there is an awful lot of side and back-talk and odd folks struggling for recognition and voices in the GOP dogpile — Palin, Steele, Jindal, etc.   Nobody is a clear, solid leader and they’re not all talking the same game.   Add to that the Republican legislators who have chosen the path of, “NO”, despite efforts to bi-partisanship by the president, and you’ve got a party locked in a struggle with itself.    At the moment, the Democrats only have to sit back and watch (if they know what’s smart) and wait until the GOP finds a real leader that unifies the party message before having to fight it.   Right now, Republicans are doing all the work in hurting themselves.

Did supporting the surge really benefit the GOP?   I don’t think so….after all, supporting the war efforts simply made it that much easier for Democrats to gain ground in the election due to the animosity it produced; the polls clearly showed that the war efforts contributed greatly to the decision to flip the leadership of this country around.

The quote from Senator Reid was improperly cited out of context.    The original article from The Hill.com quotes Reid as such:

Reid stated, “I don’t believe in the executive power trumping everything… I believe in our Constitution, three separate but equal branches of government.”

“If Obama steps over the bounds, I will tell him. … I do not work for Barack Obama. I work with him,” he said.

Meghan is VERY correct when she says the extreme-left liberals are making Obama’s efforts at a centric position extremely difficult.   I’ve never like Pelosi and Reed has struck me again and again as a mosquito to be slapped, and I do think they tend to get in the way.   That being said, what is up with the GOP refusing to give any ground on any of the major votes and instead be whipped into saying a universal negative to every major thing that comes up?   Stimulus?  NO.   Budget?  NO.   Bi-partisanship?  NO.

I think a lot of the Left (minus the few out for their party and nobody else) are trying to make a middle ground that’s happy to everyone, but how can that be encouraged when there’s no response?   At this point, I’m more likely to say, “Screw it — we tried, you didn’t budge, so now we won’t even try and you can just suffer the consequences.”   Remember that at least in the House, Democrats don’t even have to try to get GOP votes, and in the Senate, it’s fairly easy to get around the filibuster if need be.    Republicans would do well to put down their sabres and meet us in the middle of the field on occasion.

All this being said, I do agree with Meghan’s call for centrism on the part of moving forward, both for Democrats and the GOP.    This is generally how government is designed to work anyway, and is why we have the system of checks-and-balances in place to prevent the extremes from existing.    Both parties would do well to remember this as they move forward;  big changes are possible without becoming extremist, and that’s the hard balance to find and maintain.

Down She Goes!

Obviously there’s been a lot of talk lately about this whole economic stimulus package that is trying to be passed here in the United States, but other countries have now started to add in their own versions — the UK, Australia, Iceland (bad luck there, dudes), and others.   It’s all in the name of trying to get things back to “normal”, where that is indicated by more people making money and doing well than not.   And right now, most of us are either starting to falter, have stumbled, or are flat on our faces and sizing up where, exactly, we would put the KitchenAid in the cardboard box.

I’ve thought a lot about this entire idea of the stimulus, have listened religiously to NPR’s Planet Money podcasts concerning various opinions and analysis, and have thought about my own situation as well as that of others.    Despite recent polls indicating that support for the bill is falling amongst Americans, I still feel it’s a good idea, but the manner in how to go about it is the tricky part.

Tax relief?   Good.   Tax credits?   Not bad, but harder to see right away.   Infrastructure spending?   Great for the long term if done right, huge sinkhole of a money pit if done wrong.     The sides on that one are pretty slippery, too, I’m afraid.   Corporate tax cuts?   Uhm…didn’t we try that one already?  Yeah, it didn’t work.

I think the hardest part for everyone is quantifying what, exactly, is going to happen that will concern us, personally.   I mean…I’m big enough and smart enough to look at the whole picture.    I very well know that infrastructure spending, while a slow, long-haul poke in the ass of the economy, will ultimately make us a better country and we’ll be glad we did it in, say, 5 to 10 years.    But to be honest, RIGHT NOW, it doesn’t mean Jack M. Squat to me in terms of my day-to-day needs and necessities.

Giving me more money to take home is a great way to say, “Perk up!  Stimulate the economy!”    But that depends on how much it is.    $50 a paycheck isn’t going to go much farther than things do now, and I’m likely to look at that and think, “Well, I could…uh….buy another case of ramen??” whereas a significantly larger amount, say, $300, is another car payment, or mortgage boost, or a debt payment, or….there’s a lot more options for that kind of cash than a five-0h carries.

It also matters in terms of where I am versus where others are.     I still have a good, decent-paying job, and feel secure that I won’t be gone anytime soon (although nobody feels 100% secure and, rightly so).    There are tons of folks out there, however (and getting worse every day), that aren’t emloyed or at least not enough, and they’re looking at the stimulus package in a whole different light, more as a savior to impossible conditions rather than a boost.

I’m certainly not of the opinion that everyone should get a huge handout.   For one, in such a situation, you HAVE to have some people on the rocks, some business failing, and some jobs lost and so forth, otherwise nobody has motivation and the system becomes a welfare state and not an opportunistic one.    BUT, that all being said, it makes sense that we’d try to at least keep the majority of folks in good shape when possible.

What do I need?   Well, if I have to be completely selfish, here’s what MY stimulus would look like:

• More take-home money in the paycheck, of a significant amount.    Iowa, take back your silly agricultural taxes (god, state taxes here are stupid-high), and federal, ease up a bit.   I’m happy to pay for roads, but — honestly.
• Debt relief in the form of lower interest rates and longer pay periods.    Don’t know what government could do about that, but making things stretch out would sure be handy.   I’m happy enough to pay off my debts, but making it easier to buy groceries would be really kickass.
• Offer the option to have a forbearance on student loan payments for a year.    Look, I’m in it till 2021 right now;  I’m not in a hurry, so…can I just take a year off?   Charge me interest if you will, but let me forget about that one for a bit, hrm?   They’re so…annoying.
• Since I’m one of those who has a house that I can actually pay for and afford, make it easy to get monies or credits for improving our properties.   Not only will we get more efficiency, but we’ll see urban renewal, and that has to be a positive.

Really, in a nutshell, those are the things that will matter to me most, given my situation and place in life right now.     I’ll probably get a few of those things, but doubtful if I’ll get them all.

Now it’s YOUR turn — tell us what would stimulate you and why it would make a big difference in your life.    If we’re lucky, a Senator’s reading this right now.