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We like our Presidents in this country.  We like the President, typically, more than Congress.  And given most of us can’t name the Supreme Court Justices nor what they do, the President gets a lot of our attention.  When we elect Presidents, we look for certain qualities.  Strong leader, someone who sticks to their guns, someone who will go in and change Washington, someone we’d have a beer with, and someone who can answer those important calls at three in the morning.  There are others that are more specific to each voter, but for the most part people boil Presidents down by these qualities.  The funny thing is that not ONE of our founding fathers who became president would likely live up to his list above.  The list above is a modern perversion of the presidency and it has the potential to take us down the road of tyranny.

Do we really want a strong leader?  We already refer to the president as the ‘Leader of the Free World’ and yet no where in the Constitution do we give the President such a lofty title or duty.  George Washington went by Mr. President or at least preferred to go by that title.  If it was good enough for him, why is it not good enough for us now?  Our founding fathers feared a “strong leader.”  Libya, Cuba, Iran, Iraq (well not so long ago at least), North Korea, North and South Vietnam, China, the former Soviet Union, present day Russia, most African countries, they all have “strong leaders.”  Men who command power via the perceived qualities of strength.  They decide the direction of their country and their country follows.  None of these ideals are American.  Nowhere in the Constitution does the president have the authority to do that.  Executive orders are a somewhat gray area and I find it odd that my alleged conservative friends don’t take issue with them given they are not explicitly granted power in Article Two of the Constitution.  Note that it’s Article Two, not Article One, that is for the president.  He comes second, not first, and while he balances the other two branches he does not rise above them.  Congress has largely given war powers to the President to respond to a rapidly changing world.  He is the commander-in-chief of the military (not of civilians despite us also using that powerful and strong title for him), but this does not give him the power to send us to war.  We’ve given Presidents power out of fear.  We did it after 9/11 and we’ve done it many times before.  We think we need a strong leader to make tough decisions in fearful times.  We don’t.

Sticking to their guns is something the presidency is supposed to embody though not in the manner we’ve seen lately.  The presidency was designed to be just a bit more insulated from the whims of the people than the House of Representatives or even the Senate is.  The President’s job is to run the executive branch and that ability can be hampered greatly if the whim of weekly changing public opinion gets in the way.  Of course we’ve let that part happen while at the same time voting for ideological hard heads who talk up a tough campaign and then get into office only to realize they don’t have the authority to stick to their guns.  Whoops.  But we admire them for going down in flames and taking the country with them.  Whether it’s Reagan’s supply side economics or Bush Sr.’s ‘read my lips’ promises to Clinton’s insistence on always taking the middle of the road ideology to Bush Jr’s everything.   And now Obama will show us how he intends to play healthcare reform.  He has two choices.  He can play it as a president or as partisan ideologue who feels compelled to give into his bases’ wishes for the sake of getting re-elected.  I hope for the former but expect the latter.

Why would we want one person to have the ability to change how our government works?  I know why, it’s because we watch too many movies.  We see these heroic loners who go in and shake up the whole system.  Neo in the Matrix, any Western, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, all of these movies talk about how one person can change the world.  Well that’s just not true.  It sounds very inspirational especially with Hollywood scoring in the background but our Constitution makes it virtually impossible for any one person to change how the government works.  Congress is supposed to be slow and to drag out debate.  That’s not a sign of it being broken but rather functioning as intended.  It should be hard to pass large and sweeping legislation no matter how vital it is because when you make it easy you subject it to shifts in the political winds and the possibility that someone will find a way to destroy the delicate balance of democracy we live in.  The President is not given the power to change Washington.  In fact, he has the least ability to do so.  His ability to change things without oversight is limited to the departments that report to him and they are all limited severely by the law and the courts.  The President can’t write his own bills despite our apparent desire that the President should as we expect President’s to get major legislation passed so we can score the office holder based on quantity.  It’s a stupid standard and a stupid thing to expect from the Office of the President.  Most importantly, it’s not the President’s job.

My favorite is the guy I’d like to have a beer with.  The common every-man.  A comedian whose name I can’t recall said, “Next time you’re in a bar having a beer, take a look around.  See any presidents?”  Of course not.  They are all drinking single malt 100 year old Scotch at country clubs that would never let any of us in.  Even the Reagan’s and Bush’s are.  Just because someone wears flannel instead of a suit doesn’t make him an ordinary or common man.  We elect blue blood, highly educated rich men to the presidency.  The last common man that was president was Harry Truman and it’s not to say that he was better or worse than an FDR or a JFK, but he was a common man.  Too often, we ascribe common sense as something we think Washington has little of.  But common sense has become a virtue of the ignorant, something that Sarah Palin claims to have loads of and yet I wouldn’t trust her with a potato gun much less nuclear weapons.  The Presidency requires someone who can empathize, not someone who simply looks for the common solution every time.  Harry Truman wasn’t a Harvard graduate, but he was able to see beyond the common sense solution and consider the consequences.  He didn’t drop the atomic bomb because it made sense, he did it because he had more reasons to do it than not.  Problems that our government faces don’t always have a right and wrong answer.  They often have several answers and any number of them can be acceptable though different solutions.  A president needs the ability to see that.  Not to have the stain of what they learned in the first eighteen years of their life dictate their actions as President.  I don’t care if my president drinks beer or the finest liquors.  It’s an irrelevant and silly measure of the person in office.

And then there’s the ever important three in the morning phone call.  I don’t doubt the White House gets many calls at three in the morning.  I wonder how many the president sleeps through.  Probably many more than we think.  Making those decisions, like the atomic bomb decision above, isn’t something anyone is ready for until they have to do it.  There is no litmus test for that.  A candidate can say one thing on the campaign trail and get into office only to discover that what they thought they knew is wrong or that the process won’t let them meet their prior goals.  The three in the morning phone call is a moment where there is no way to measure how someone would respond.  Anyone who can answer how they would respond is speculating at best and lying at worst.  We can only hope we vote for someone smart enough to surround themselves with people smarter than them who may have a good answer for that phone call.

So what should our president be like?  Well ever since Washington, they’ve sort of gone towards what we have today.  Adams faced bitter partisanship that paralyzed his administration at times.  Jefferson became the first of many small government promising presidential candidates to expand the powers of government as he did with the Louisiana Purchase.  This unproven theory of small government flies in the face of what most of us want from our country which is to be number one in everything.  You don’t get there by being cheap.  I prefer my presidents to be like Dwight Eisenhower.  Maybe not like him in terms of all of his politics, but his demeanor.  I don’t care if the president plays more rounds of golf than the number of bills they push through Congress.  I’d prefer the president to do their job outlined in the Constitution.  And nothing more.  I’d prefer them to be Mr. President, and no more.  They don’t need to lead the free world or even us.  They need to administrative branch and let Congress do its job.  They need to get declarations of war instead of using the War Powers Act.  They need to stop being celebrities and we need to stop making them into something more than they are.  A person we vote into a temp job.  They are an office holder, a caretaker, not a leader.  For a nation that talks up our Constitution, we need to live by it a bit more.

There’s one quality of Americans that isn’t as talked about as the others.  We talk about our patriotism (defined as blind devotion to the government regardless of their choices), our love of liberty (for the most part), our sense of individualism (unless you’re a failing big business), and our optimism (well, maybe this one has expired).  However it’s our love of all things abundant that is both our most consistent and somewhat insidious trait.

The notion of abundance is easy to see.  We used to have abundant everything.  We would say things like, “we’ll never run out of trees,” and you can insert whatever you like in place of trees be it water, food, money, it doesn’t matter because they were all seen as so abundant we could never use them up.  We were founded on and sold on an idea of abundance from day one and it’s the one trait of this country we will likely give up the hardest.  We believe it’s a right, though it’s hard to find in the constitution.  If we can afford it, then we can afford to waste it should be printed just below “In God We Trust” on our currency.

It’s everywhere from our breakfast to our healthcare.  Bacon and eggs was a traditional English breakfast designed to add energy and protein first thing in the morning before people went out to work the fields.  Today, a full English breakfast comes with fried mushrooms, fried or grilled tomatoes, fried bread or toast and sausages.  In America, it can come with steak, pancakes, French toast (not sure how the English feel about that), chicken fried steak, hash browns, fried potatoes, and/or corned beef hash.  In addition to three eggs and four strips of bacon.  Oh and sausages are available too.  Following this breakfast, we then either go to work where most of us sit in a chair or at best stand and walk a bit, or on our days off sit on the couch and watch other people play sports that barely burn off all the calories we just consumed.  And we have the gall to wonder why we’re getting fat.

It’s in our energy policies too.  Last year, Barack Obama had the audacity to suggest that perhaps we couldn’t go forward with the notion that we can always have our houses cooled and heated to those two magic numbers, 72 and 68 degrees.  Of course “conservatives” (funny how conserve is in their namesake) lampooned him for saying it.  But he was noting, having lived in Indonesia and seen just how much abundance we truly have, that perhaps we have to give a little too.  We all know that all six billion people on the planet cannot live like we do.  There aren’t enough resources for that.  And yet, we pretend as if we want the whole world to have what we have.  In reality, we don’t realize that in order to do that we have to give up some of our abundance.

The worst offense of Continue reading “America’s Abundance” »

The massive stimulus package passed last year to blunt the impact of the worst U.S. recession in 70 years created up to 2.1 million jobs in the last three months of 2009, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

The package boosted the economy by up to 3.5 percent and lowered the unemployment rate by up to 2.1 percent during that period, CBO said.

The report comes as President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are pushing further measures to bring down the 9.7 percent unemployment rate before the November congressional elections.

The $787 billion price tag of the package, officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has prompted a growing backlash from voters worried about record budget deficits. Republicans have labeled the package a failure, though economists on the left and right say it helped ward off a depression.

CBO’s new report closely resembles its initial estimates from March 2009, shortly after Obama signed the bill into law.

Though the economy performed more poorly than predicted, that was not due to the ineffectiveness of the stimulus package, CBO said.

“In CBO’s judgment, that outcome reflects greater-than-projected weakness in the underlying economy rather than lower-than-expected effects” of the stimulus, the research office said.

The package is likely to have the greatest impact this year, according to CBO. It is expected to boost GDP by between 1.4 percent and 4 percent and bring down the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percent and 1.8 percent in 2010, higher figures than last year when many of its programs were being set up. The impact is expected to trail off over the next two years.

Direct purchasing of goods and services by the federal government and states have been the most effective provision of the act, CBO said. Among the least effective: a tax credit for first-time homebuyers and a tax cut for the wealthy.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, 8.4 million jobs have been lost. Though the economy started growing again last year, CBO chief Doug Elmendorf said at a congressional hearing that any recovery was likely to be slow.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35543310/ns/business-economy_at_a_crossroads/

Not one Republican in either house voted for the Recovery Act that has now been shown to have created up to 2.1 million jobs. The CBO which is a non-partisan budget office in charge of deriving these statistics concludes that the much maligned stimulus bill has been successful with much of it’s impact expected this year. The stimulus is a classic Keynesian economic tactic to temporarily drive demand when the private sector is incapable of doing so. The bill provided tax relief to 95% of Americans, balanced state budgets stemming layoffs, invested in many infrastructure and energy projects and extended unemployment benefits for millions of Americans hurting from the recession. With half the money yet spent we should see continued growth well into this year hopefully bridging the gap to better economic times.

The GOP should pay a heavy penalty for voting against a bill providing so many American’s with relief all while taking credit for the state projects the bill funded. The GOP hopes to capitalize this November on a weak economy and anemic job growth but their vote against this bill may come back to haunt them.

The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has reached 1,000, an independent Web site said on Tuesday, and another deadly bombing in the volatile south highlighted the struggle to stabilize the country.

Civilian and military casualties hit record highs last year as violence reached its worst levels since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001, with foreign forces launching two big offensives in the past eight months to stem a growing insurgency.

A Web site which tracks casualties, www.icasualties.org, said 54 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan this year, raising the total to 1,000 since the Taliban’s fall. This compares with eight this year in Iraq, where 4,378 have been killed since 2003.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35534294/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

The war has been going on longer than WW2 or the Civil War. October will mark the 9th year of the Afghan War and officially make it the longest US war in our history. It is a shame that we are still there and only recently decided on the correct strategy to win a decisive victory and bring our troops home. We spent close to 7 years wasting time in Iraq while not implementing the right strategy nor providing the adequate troops and equipment to finish what we started just a month after 911.  It appears our strategy is starting to take root as we beat back the Taliban while capturing or killing their leadership in Pakistan. We may face several more years of conflict and many more deaths but we are on a path towards finally ending this struggle.

I have a doctor’s appointment this month on the sixteenth.  I scheduled it in December.  I have excellent insurance that is mostly paid by my employer and covers everything from open-heart surgery to the sniffles.  I can choose acupuncture and have ninety percent of it covered.  My deductible is one hundred and fifty dollars and my co-pay is fifteen dollars to see a doctor and twenty for a specialist.  I pay seven dollars for most prescriptions and at most fifty for experimental medicine.  I have it very good when it comes to health care.  For all of this, it costs me about forty dollars a paycheck before taxes.  My company kicks in another two hundred and fifty dollars a paycheck.  Most would say I have it very good when it comes to health care.

Despite this, I have few good things to say about my health care.  Most concerning to me is how I had to wait two months to see a general practitioner whereas I could see a dermatologist this afternoon if I needed to.  That’s great if I have deadly zits, but it’s not so good for catching the things that tend to kill most Americans.  Consider it similar to a problem with your car.  It appears to be a transmission problem but you aren’t certain.  If you take it to a shop that does nothing but transmissions, they will likely tell you it needs to be rebuilt to the tune of $1,500 dollars.  If you take it to the dealer, they will run a wider range of tests and typically won’t do any work if they can’t diagnose the problem.  Primary care is that kind of care and the kind that saves lives more often than not.  And yet, I wait as long as in Canada or the UK for it.  For this privilege, I contribute to the most expensive health care system in the world.  And I settle for, at best, being just below or near the bottom of the top ten countries in quality of care. Continue reading “We’ll Get What We Give…A Health Care Tale” »