Category: Politics, Religion & Money

Yes, Obama’s answers go on for too long, and he repeats himself a lot, but he’ll get the hang of it. I think he’s got the right temperament for the job, which I first noticed when he handled the Jeremiah Wright controversy.

Obama plays both the good cop and bad cop roles. If his first gesture of forgiveness is ignored (as with Wright), or his willingness to compromise (as with Republican senators fighting the economic package) is refused, then Obama gets tough. Yet he doesn’t cop the blatant “my way or the highway” style of Bush and Cheney.

Cheney should shut up about Obama not being up to handling terrorist threats. He’s lucky he isn’t having his ass hauled into the World Court in Holland for war crimes. Cheney once infamously told Senator Patrick Leahy to “go f–k yourself,” and now Leahy is calling for an investigation of how we were led into invading a country that didn’t attack us, nor posed any threat to us.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-truth10-2009feb10,0,4555508.story

Leahy said, “I don’t want to embarrass anybody. I don’t want to punish anybody. I just want the truth to come out so this never happens again.” He may not want to embarrass or punish anybody, but I sure as Hell hope that happens.

Hey, here’s something that’s good for a laugh. The Libertarians at the Cato Institute put this ad, signed by about 200 college professors (don’t know if they’re all really economists), in some newspapers on Monday, including The Boston Globe.

How can these guys be so smart, yet be so stupid? Easy. Because they’re viewing things from an extreme ideology. Hoover didn’t spend anything to halt the slide into Depression. Where did they come up with that? He didn’t do anything and things got very bad. That’s the point! Obama doesn’t want to wait, he wants to get moving now, while the money can do some good.

FDR got in office and he spent money and created jobs, but it wasn’t enough. Not until World War II came along. So it was, in the end, massive government spending that got America out of the Depression. But keep in mind, Cato kooks, that we’ve already been in a war, and that’s a big part of the reason why we’re in so much trouble. The coffers were drained before the brokers, the bankers, and the auto makers came begging.

The Bush/Cheney administration is the closest the Cato Institute will ever have to a Presidency in tune with their view of how government should be run. If they don’t like the way Bush handled things, then they’re looking for the same thing Communists want — a system that can never exist according the doctrine they hold so dearly.

When George Bush took office in 2001 I tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he started talking up a renewed missile defense program, and followed it up with a cut in federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. So even before 9/11 my negative view of him was cemented.

President Obama is moving quickly to undo the many misguided directives of his predecessor, including the ban on stem cell funding. Some time back I had posted these items about Michael J. Fox’s struggles with Parkinson’s Disease

http://www.dograt.com/2006/10/21/pd-is-not-pc/
http://www.dograt.com/2006/10/31/colbert-catches-up/

This week the PBS series Frontline is featuring a program about Parkinson’s Disease called “My father, My brother, and Me.” As one would expect, Michael J. Fox appears in the show, and in this extended interview you can see that he looks pretty good, but the long-term effects of his medication are in evidence. It was these sorts of mis-movements, called dyskinesias, that Rush Limbaugh — no stranger to the effects of drugs — in his ignorance ridiculed as being intentional on Fox’s part.

Oh, p’shaw. A giant, bronze-colored fiberglass shoe, commemorating the throwing of shoes at George Bush by an Iraqi journalist, has been removed.

You can still give the dearly departed ex-President a virtual whack by clicking here.