Was Obama a Sellout

I keep hearing this implication, that Obama somehow capitulated on his progressive principles. Let's be clear, Obama, as well as Hillary as well as Bernie as well as most Democrats would all like to have a single payer system, if we could just wave a magic wand; it is simply not possible unless we have a 65 to 70 seat majority in the senate. Please remember back to 2009, for a short time Democrats had a 60 vote majority in the senate. Remember Joe Lieberman who was hanging out with John McCain and flirting with switching parties. It took every one of those 60 votes to do anything. Obama and others suggested a single payer system or a public option but there were about 5 Democratic senators including Lieberman who were absolutely opposed. Therefore, Obama, being a pragmatist instead of a rigid ideologue, sat down with these conservative Democratic senators to hammer out a system that they would support and that would make life better for millions of Americans – Obamacare. For this, Obama has been called a sellout.

For Bernie or anyone else to pass a single payer system would require not just a 60 vote majority but probably a 65-70 senate majority. Short of this super-super majority in the senate, Bernie's big bold talk about single payer as well as breaking up the big banks or reforming Wall Street is just that – talk.

A president being a rigid ideologue will accomplish nothing; that is why Bernie for all his years in the legislature has never accomplished anything.

Would you rather have a president who will hold tight to his progressive principles or a president that will work with others to make people's lives a little better even though we don't get everything we want?

Why I Am No Longer a Republican

I don't know anyone who is for abortion as a preferred method of birth control. In fact, most progressives know that we could get elective abortion down close to zero if we would simply provide free birth control and counseling to all women.

Every woman's situation and pregnancy is different with a vast array of different conditions such as numerous possible health issues affecting the woman and the fetus along with a host of differing social and economic issues involving the age of the mother, lack of family support, education status, employ-ability, father abandonment and other societal pressures.

My abortion position comes down to this: Who is in the better position to weigh all the different pressures and conditions to arrive at the most sensible outcome, the woman who is intimately involved or the government with a one size fits all proclamation?

Should a woman be forced by the state to carry to term and give birth to a mentally retarded child? Or a child with a deformed body? Or a rapist's child? Or her father's child? What if she is only 15? Should she be forced to quit school and get a menial job to try to take care of a baby alone? Every situation is different and the woman is in the best position to weigh the variety of conditions and make the choice; not the government.

Now if Republicans were serious about reducing abortions to near zero, that could easily be achieved by providing free birth control and education in its use to all young girls approaching puberty as has been done in many other countries to great success. But no, Republicans almost always oppose freely available birth control while insisting on abstinence only and at the same time demand that all women be forced to carry the resulting pregnancies to term, this is cruel and misogynistic and this is why I am no longer a Republican.

Logical Disproof of God

It is good to have true beliefs that reflect reality and toward that purpose let's perform a simple yet plausible thought experiment. Suppose we have a newborn fawn in a forest and a forest fire sweeps by and leaves the fawn severely burned but still alive. The fawn lays there for three days in excruciating pain before finally dying.

If there is an all knowing God, He/She was aware of the suffering fawn.

If that God was all powerful, then He/She was also able to stop the fawn's suffering.

The fact that the fawn suffered for three days proves that this all knowing, all powerful God either does not exist or doesn't care about the suffering of the fawn.

This is a logical disproof of God that has been around in one form or another since the early Greek philosophers. Theists have no answer to this logical disproof of God. They just ignore it and hope no one brings it up or spout something about God having some hidden purpose. There is no purpose served by the fawn suffering. Rene Descartes, the 17^th century French philosopher, provided the only logical counter to this line of reasoning when he argued that animals must not actually feel pain. They just appear to feel pain but not really. So when you accidentally step on your dog's tail and he lets out a yelp, he didn't really feel it and if you can convince yourself of that, then the disproof of God as outlined above is invalid since the fawn really wasn't suffering. But we all know that the fawn lying there crying out in excruciating agony does indeed feel pain. If there was an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God, the fawn's suffering simply would not happen.

The Republican Meme of Obama's Failure

My guess is that Democrats are going to lose the Senate in this coming 2014 election. There is a pall of apathy in the country; just the thing to result in remarkably low turnout for Democrats and independents.
The media, whether intentionally or not, has been colluding with the Republicans to create a feeling in the country that nothing is working, Obama is incompetent, Obama is failing and government can't get anything done. Just a damn minute, what has Obama failed at? Is it because of ISIS or Putin or Ebola? There are always going to be crises in the world and a U.S. president can not control or prevent them, he can only deal with these crises in a sane and rational manner which Obama is doing.
What has Obama failed at? Nothing! He has succeeded time after time with no credit from the media. He inherited an economy on the verge of total collapse and prevented a second Great Depression, he returned modest regulation to an out-of-control banking sector, he rescued the American auto industry,  the economy has broken Bill Clinton's record for the longest period of sustained private sector job creation ever,  the deficit is declining at the fastest rate in 60 years, we are adding jobs faster than anytime since the 1990s tech boom, more than half of all stock market wealth in America has been created under Obama, the U.S. has just passed Saudi Arabia to become the number one oil producer in the world, the cost of solar energy is plummeting as the U.S approaches total energy independence, Obama made great strides in securing the world's loose nukes, passed and implemented universal healthcare, made the gutsy call to kill Osama bin Laden, ended two wars he inherited, killed more terrorists in 5 years than the previous president did in 8, showed how to disarm a country of its WMD by disarming Syria of all its WMD without firing a shot, deposed the tyrant Qaddafi in Libya without using American troops and captured the mastermind of the Benghazi attack. Whew, and that's nowhere near a complete list!
He did all this with near total Republican obstructionism; an opposition party actually trying to harm the economy as a means of damaging the president. Think how much better things could be if we had an opposition party that put the interests of the country ahead of hateful partisan politics.
Yet the media, for whatever reason, continues to hammer Obama as a failed president despite his long string of impressive successes. Republicans want the country to be in a sour mood. They know that if ordinary voters are feeling like hope is lost or just generally apathetic, they will not show up to vote and that will help Republicans since their ideologically enraged base will always show up. Therefore I see major Republican gains due in large part to a media that has bought into, and fed, the Republican meme of Obama's failure.

Obama May Prove to be the Greatest President Ever

Obama has accomplished more without war than perhaps any president in history: Inherited an economy on the verge of total collapse and prevented a second Great Depression, the American economy has just marked the longest period (52 months) of sustained private sector job creation ever in history eclipsing Bill Clinton's previous record of 51 months,  the deficit is declining at the fastest rate in 60 years, the economy is adding jobs faster than anytime since the 1990s tech boom, more than half of all stock market wealth in America has been created in the last 5 years, Obama has made great strides in securing the world's loose nukes, passed and implemented universal healthcare, made the gutsy call to kill Osama bin Laden, ended two wars he inherited, brought home the last POW, killed more terrorists in 5 years than the previous president did in 8 years, showed how to disarm a country of its WMD by disarming Syria of all its WMD without firing a shot, deposed the tyrant Qaddafi in Libya without using American troops, captured the mastermind of the Benghazi attack and forced Putin to blink and back down from reconstituting a new Soviet empire without using military threats and risking WW3. Whew, that's not even a complete list!
He did all this with complete Republican obstructionism; an opposition party actually trying to harm the economy as a means of hurting the president. Think how much better things could be if we had an opposition party that put the interests of the country ahead of hateful partisan politics.
If a Republican president achieved any one of the above accomplishments, they would be carving his face on Mt Rushmore. Yet all Obama receives is scorn and hate from an opposition party that refuses to celebrate American victories if it means giving the black guy a shred of credit.
The Republican opposition to Obama has not been anything like normal and appropriate opposition on policies, it has been unprecedented in its extreme, over-the-top hatred, unlike anything ever seen before. Republicans take offense when this opposition is called racist but are we to believe that the first black president and the most extreme opposition to a president ever in history, just happen to coincide and have nothing in common? This hatred of the president can't be because he is extreme in his policies because he is not, he is a moderate with which many on the left have been disappointed. As an aside, this is why Obama's poll numbers come out low; he gets down voted by a lot of people on the left in addition to the conservatives. So again, is the first black president accompanied by the most extreme hatred of a president in history just a coincidence? Obviously not. Like it or not, Obama may prove to be the greatest president ever. Maybe we should start looking at plans for Obama's face on Mt Rushmore.

True Faith Does Not Deny Science and Reality

While not intending to demean anyone because of their religious beliefs since one of the great things about this country is that you can believe pretty much anything, but have you ever considered why you believe so strongly in your religion? Was it because, as a young child, you did exhaustive research into all the religions of the world and found the evidence for one particular religion to be convincing? Or, was it because as a young child who trusted your parents and saw them as incredibly smart; you were indoctrinated into your parents religion before you were capable of mature critical thought? Isn't that the reason that your religious assumptions are so deeply ingrained and feel so right? And isn't that the reason that everywhere you look on Earth, children, with very rare exceptions, believe in the religion of their parents and believe that that particular religion is THE TRUTH whether it is Protestant, Catholic, Muslim or whatever?

To a five-year-old, parents are incredibly knowledgeable and trustworthy, by the age of 15, not so much. Looking back, do you think your parents, unique among all the people of the world, were actually right about everything? Do you think your parents had special insight into the nature of existence or were they just doing to you what had been done to them? Didn't you just blindly adopt most of the views of your parents who blindly adopted views from their parents and so on down the line? If you are nothing more than just a conduit for taking the views of our ignorant ancestors and pounding them into the minds of our children so that they can grow up and do the same, then what was the point of your life? How can you make a difference?

What I am suggesting is incredibly difficult. To hold up long held core assumptions to the light of scrutiny is the most difficult task most of us can ever undertake. True faith does not deny reality, it embraces it.

Intelligent Design Can't Just Be the Nice Parts

A very nicely done video on Intelligent Design.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v83X9-oJ-w