My Two Cents or: Thats what we all have left

Right now you and I and everyone in America are living in history. This is an extraordinary time to be alive on the planet. We live in a culmination of philosophy, technology and ideology. When they write the History books I think a good title would be, America at the turn of the 21^st Century: The triumph of ideology over common sense.

Consider all that the Republicans have accomplished with George Bush in just under eight years.

They have left the United States Government with the biggest budget deficit ever. Larger than all other Presidents combined!

They deregulated everything resulting in the greatest finical crisis in this country since the great depression. Yesterday, on word that the Government would not bail out rich bankers who already stole your money with more of our tax dollars, the Down Jones suffered its greatest single day drop in history. 777 points down or a trillion dollars of wealth evaporated around the globe. Remember when they talked about privatizing social security? Can you imagine the scope of this disaster if they had already gotten their greedy hands on more of Americas 401k’s and retirement funds? Of course this is a Republican mess. Bush spent more than a few of his rare speeches to America talking about creating an “Ownership society.” He talked about easing regulations on the banks and making it easier for people with bad credit, low credit or no credit to buy a home with no money down.

We have approximately 150,000 troops occupying a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at the price of 10 Billion dollars a month. This is on top of the deficits they already have. The entire Iraq war has been kept ‘of the books.’ When they say they need supplemental budgets passed they mean there are two books. One for all the other stuff they ran up and one for the war.

There are now more independent contractors in Iraq than U.S. service men. They waged this war with a for profit mind set never stopping to think that the money paid to these private contractors was borrowed from China.

Corruption cases involving high level government workers with direct access to the White House has never been higher. The CIA’s number 3 man was just arrested today for steering business to a friends company. He did this by creating fake companies as cover. You know, just like ENRON did when they deregulated the energy markets and stole billions from California with an engineered crisis.

There is a long list of Republicans either in jail now or awaiting trial for bribery, theft, collusion, conspiracy and fraud.

America, you have to wake up now and take a look at what ruling this nation under an ideology and not under the rule of law has done to you. Logic got thrown out the window in favor of making money for a very small very elite group of men whose morality is something like an acid dream from the Old Testament. Yet, John McCain, the “new” cheerleader for the Republican Party wants nothing to change. Everything that Bush has done he wants to do bigger. Course a man his age has a 1 in 4 chance of dying before he makes it to the end of his first year in office. That would mean Sarah Palin would become our President. I have heard no intelligent person raise a cry against this because she is a woman. It is clear from the few interviews we have been allowed to have with her that she is so far out of her depth that it is an embarrassment to all of America that a person with nothing to intellectually offer us in a time of need has been nominated by a major party. When Katie Couric nails you in an interview it might be time to seriously think about what the Republicans want you to swallow. Either a man who has publicly and proudly stated that he has never sent a e-mail, doesn’t really understand how the economy works and sang “Bomb bomb bomb. Bomb bomb Iran” will be President or a person who went to 5 colleges in 6 years who claims foreign policy expertise because Russia is so close to Alaska will be.

Is it so ridiculous to want a leader who is at least as smart as I am? In fact, I want a leader who is smarter than I am. I want a leader who knows what the Internet is. I want a leader who understands what the constitution is. I want a leader who knows what poverty feels like.

Obama is a politician. By definition that means his words should be scrutinized and his promises consider less than meaningful. But when you put him next to John McCain, anyone who is serious about the future cannot logically expect McCain to lead America into the 21^st. Century. McCain has been in Washington as a professional politician for 26 years. He was part of another famous banking disaster in the 80’s known as the Keating five where the U.S. Government bailed out the savings and loan business because five very influential men operated it without regulation. In other words, the last time John McCain didn’t understand how the economy worked it cost the Tax Payer a couple of Billion dollars already.

You can look at this any way you want but it is already pretty obvious that the ideology of a ultra conservative splinter group with in the Republican party did away with rules and regulations so the rich could get richer while the poor die in Iraq for oil that gets idled away in SUV’s in the parking lots of middle America mega churches. The republicans have failed spectacularly. Not just because I say so, but by their own standards. They are the party of fiscal responsibility and smaller Government? Not from where I have been watching these last eight years. They are the party that opposes logic in the face of scientific evidence. NASA, the EPA and officials inside the FDA have all come forward and exposed the level of outright censorship the White House has insistent upon when it came to our environment, our food and drugs and our collective safety as a species on this planet. Think that’s too dramatic? They invented a program where power plants could put more pollution into the air. They named it the Clear skies initiative. They devised a way for logging companies to take more trees from our national forests under a program called the healthy forest initiative. When we first went into Iraq the operation was ironically titled, Operation Infinite Liberty. O.I.L. Like Orwell’s 1984, whatever they tell you means the exact opposite of what they are doing.

Electing Obama President is not an emotional grasp at change. It is the only logical step we as a people can take to change the direction eight years of Bush has put us on. Under Bush, gas prices rose faster than at any other time in Americas history. Under Bush, our money has lost value. Under Bush, we have lost our moral authority as a super power in a very troubled world. I am not waiting for history to pass judgment on the Republicans and the ruins they are leaving us with. You don’t have to wait either. You can vote for change or you can vote for more of the same. We don’t know what a half black Harvard Graduate in constitutional law who was raised by a single mother will do if we reward him with the most powerful office in the world. But I am willing to take the chance rather than stick with what has been done. George Bush and the Neo-Conservatives hijacked America while we were all watching reality TV. They hijacked it, turned it abruptly to the right and just like every business George Bush ever got his privileged hands on, flew it into the ground.

Vote Obama. It is too important to let another out of touch old guy get his hands on this country again. If you want change America you have to stop doing what you have done and try something else. Perhaps we should vote for the President based on the color of his skin. When the color of your hair and you skin match, maybe you shouldn’t be President.

Just one more thing before I sign off on this post. If you want a clear metaphor for where we are as a nation mediate on this. yesterday when all other stocks dropped one company's stock actually rose. The Campbel Soup company. You know how you keep hearing the talking heads keep saying stuff like not since the great depression? Well, get ready for the soup Kitchen folks.