Pre-Inaugeration Notes #1

 

Watched Barak Obama being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos. Regardless of how one feels about some of the things he has, or has not done in the last year, one is struck on how Presidential he really is. This man will always be held up as the perfect image of the President of the United States and along with his wife and daughters as the perfect first family. They have been exemplary examples of the kind of people we want leading our country. Donald Trump will be hard pressed to present the same kind of example to American youth.

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The Republicans ran on the promise to abolish Obamacare. They can now say that they won on that promise. Yeah, they can say it but that means that they are stuck with it. The problem that the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell now face is, no matter their campaign lies, they are looking at a program that has insured twenty million more people than before its existence and it has done so while lowering insurance cost increases to a point lower than at any time in the last fifty years, thereby insuring that the program will stay solvent for at least the next thirty years. Those are facts, not GOP bullshit. Given those facts how the hell are Ryan and McConnell going to justify getting rid of Obamacare; especially since they have nothing with which to replace it? They have now had seven years to come up with a plan that is better than Obamacare and the bankrupt minds of the right are just as bankrupt today on that replacement as they were in 2009,

The Republican leadership’s problem is that the basic structure of Obamacare not only works but it works better than anything that anyone else has come up with in the history of the nation. The search for a working healthcare program didn’t start with Barak Obama. It has been around almost forever. Yes, there are things wrong with the program. Everyone knows what these things are and I would venture to say that almost everyone knows how to solve them. It’s just that everyone (read the Republicans) doesn’t want to put those solutions in place because they run directly in the teeth of the lobbies that support all those Republican congressmen and even some Democrats. The insurance industry, the medical equipment manufacturers, the drug companies, the hospital corporations and many doctors pay a hell of a lot of their profits to the lobbyists who pass it on to members of congress just so the needed improvements never make it into legislation. That’s why your current health coverage isn’t perfect, that’s why the Right hates Obamacare and that’s why nothing good will ever come out of this congress when it comes to healthcare. They are already bought and sold.

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Interestingly enough, just minutes after I wrote the above I watched Mitch McConnell, probably the worst Senator in the history of this country, come on TV and lie over and over about the status of Obamacare and what the GOP was going to do about it. McConnell’s most outstanding lie was that the GOP was ready to replace it. They haven’t a clue how to do that, nor do they have anything like a plan ready, even after all these years of trying to come up with one. Why? Because doing something for anyone but themselves, just isn’t in the Republican lexicon.

John Dickerson: When will you come up with a replacement?

McConnell: Quickly.

John Dickerson: is that a week, a month or a year?

McConnell; Quickly

That, dear readers mean this moron doesn’t have a clue when, or if there will be a replacement because there is no replacement. He has lied to the American people from beginning to end about Obamacare. He lies when he says it costs more. Costs more than what? Not having any? No it isn’t a perfect plan, due mostly to the efforts of crooked punks like McConnell to keep any improvement from happening just because he hated Obama more than he loved the American people that Obama served. This prune-faced clown is still smarting under his failure to keep Obama from getting elected a second time. He is a disaster for this country and should be shot as a traitor. If I had to pick a single human being who exemplifies everything that is wrong with our political system it would be Mitch McConnell.

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Reince Pribus has a tough job. But watching him being interviewed by John Dickerson today, it became apparent that even if it was an easy job, he’s just not up to it. On the subjects of Obama’s sanctions against the Russians for hacking the election process and whether some sort of replacement would accompany the trashing of Obamacare, Pribus was so confused and blundering that Dickerson was openly laughing at him Pribus looked like the fool that he has always been.

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Then we had a look at Cory Booker in an interview with the same John Dickerson and we see what a politician should be. He quickly points out that when this county was in free fall over the economic and military blunders of the Bush eight years, McConnell stated most clearly that his number one goal was not to solve any of these problems caused by his party, but to keep Obama, who was trying to fix said problems, from getting a second term. Booker states, it is not his goal to make any political points but to help those who need help to achieve a better life. That’s what we need from our politicians, a sense that they understand what their job is really all about. It’s not getting rich and powerful but helping the American people to get richer and at least as stable as they can.

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The shootings in the airport in Fort Lauderdale this weekend are typical of so many other examples of violence that we have seen over the past few years in that our security officials already had knowledge of the perps and did nothing about them. This one however is particularly egregious in that this guy walked into an FBI office in Alaska and told them he was hearing voices that wanted him to join ISIS. So what did they do? They put him in the hospital for four days under observation and then they released him. Is that what you would have done if you were the FBI? People who hear voices are not normal. They are not always dangerous but they are definitely not normal and as such there is no way they should be allowed to have a gun. The first duty of the FBI is to protect the American people. In search of that goal the first thing they should have done with Estaban Santiago was to find out if he was armed and if he was, to confiscate his weapon or weapons. This they did. But then they gave it back. There is no way in the world that he should have been allowed to carry a weapon onto a plane and then use it in an airport terminal. In allowing that, the FBI has completely failed in their mission. Maybe if they weren’t so involved in Hillary’s emails they would have time to do their real job.

I heard some pundit on the tube ask; what were they supposed to do? Read the above idiot! The problem is, there are so many people and organizations involved in making money off the manufacturer of guns and ammo that the real goal of gun control gets lost. If you can’t keep people with mental conditions from having guns then we have completely lost our ability to protect, in any way, the people of our county

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They are already speaking about the Obama legacy and it’s interesting to hear the inaccurate opinions of even the most informed pundits. First when considering such a question we have to go back to the facts. Maybe later we can get to the opinions. The first fact we must consider is, when he had congress on his side, Obama passed two milestone pieces of legislation that first saved the economy and then saved the lives of a huge number of people. I am speaking of course, of his bailout of the auto industry that saved millions of jobs in a Bush caused crash that almost took the nation into the toilet.

Millions lost trillions in a crash built on the Republican induced reduction of business regulations and the resultant criminality displayed by the business sector. This is not conjecture. This is what happened.

The second huge piece of legislation was the Affordable Care Act, which gave much needed medical care to millions that here-to-fore had been without it. Yes, it was, unquestionably, a flawed piece of legislation but by its nature it had to be in order to be passed into law, and many of the points on which it failed were demanded by Republicans and yes some Democrats, in order to get it through congress. There were a lot of greedy interested parties and a lot of lobbyists fighting the ACA and there still are.

These were two huge pieces of legislation, and they augured well for more. But then the Democrats lost the House and eventually the Senate and all legislation, good or bad, stopped with a regressive Republican congress, which Obama was not skilled enough to twist to his ends.

,We were then treated to six years of a Republican congress voting, uselessly, 52 times, to repeal the ACA instead of trying to fix it; of complete obstruction of any other legislation no matter how badly needed, and finally of Obama giving up and pushing Presidential orders into place to provide fixes that were obviously needed in various areas of government.

Maybe because of his early work, Obama was able to see the economy recover, adding 16 million jobs, but the pace was agonizingly slow for many and angered many others who saw the banks and Wall Street recover in the form of a record boom while they slowly dragged themselves out of a mire of homelessness and debt at an agonizing pace.

Obama did keep us out of new wars but in Syria it looked like we had abandoned our moral duty. His work on the Iran treaty and with the Chinese has been considerably more productive.

It is obviously in the moral sphere that Obama led the nation, perhaps better than any president since Jimmy Carter. His personal conduct, that of his family and the way he always remained presidential regardless of what went on around him should be, but unfortunately doesn’t seem to be, a model for the incoming administration, which appears to have abandoned everything Obama displayed in favor of a white trash approach to the White House. Will it be long before Trump has all those ugly walnut doors painted gold?

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Donald Trump and all the Republicans had a hell of a lot to say about how the Clintons funded what may be the best charity in the world, the Clinton Initiative. Now that they all had their say, the Trump camp seems to have conveniently forgotten the whole thing. It turns out now that Trump wants to raise money for a newly formed charity called Opening Day. The defective Trump boys were offering access to their dad the day after the inauguration or hunting trips with either of them where the donor could shoot an endangered species for a million dollar contribution. A couple of weeks ago they were pimping out their sister Ivanka for a coffee for a donation to another of their suspicious charities. What’s next? Are Uday and Cusay gong to auction off a pair of Ivanka’s panties?

This is exactly what the Trump’s accused the Clinton’s of doing. The big difference, and there is one, is that the money in the Clinton Initiative went to combat disease all over the planet, saved thousands of lives and did everything that a good charity is supposed to do. No one is talking about what Opening Day does, other than pay off Trump’s campaign debt.

Watched Joe Scarborough try to get around this by talking about how Clinton tried to raise money for all kinds of things in the White House twenty odd years ago and hoping that we won’t pay attention to the Trump’s doing it now, even before Trump takes office. If this continues they’ll be selling Trump burgers on the front steps of the White House before February.