On the Green Tea Party

In the today’s opinion section, Thomas Friedman argues for a “Tea Party With a Difference" and in it he poses a very interesting argument.  I really enjoyed: The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century and thought it was a good book and a good read.  However I’ve come to disagree more and more with him.

In this opinion piece, Friedman argues the Tea Party should become the Green Tea Party and focus on saving the country from foreign oil and reach out to the environmental clubs such as The Sierra Club

I’d be happy to design the T-shirt logo and write the manifesto. The logo is easy. It would show young Americans throwing barrels of oil imported from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia into Boston Harbor.

Which is a great idea, to become energy independent and to get off foreign oil is not the way to do it.  And he obviously doesn’t understand one of the tenants of the Tea Party:  to eliminate as much of the government control and interference when he proposes how to get energy independent:

If we put a Patriot Fee on all of those imported barrels, we would use less, cease enriching bad regimes, strengthen our own dollar, make the air cleaner and the climate more stable, foster the exploitation of domestic and renewable energy sources, promote electric vehicles, help bring down the global price of oil (which hurts Iran and helps poor Africa), and we could use the revenue to shrink the deficit. It’s win, win, win, win, win, win …

I support a better environment, I support becoming energy independent.  I do not support a tax that forces me to change my life.  This is not how to get people to support energy independence, make it a choice, not a tax.

A response to: There’s No Hope With Dope

As  I couldn’t find a place to put a comment on your recent post to Planet Debian, I am writing this blog as a response.  I find your post offensive in several ways and hope it was all tongue in cheek:

1.  The use of the term negro is unacceptable even when quoting what Senator Reid said.  This word is charged with racial undertones and shouldn’t be used by anyone.  Especially a US Senator

2.  There is no need to have a post such as this appearing on Planet Debian.  Do you speak for all of Debian?  Obviously the answer is no.  Remember not everyone shares your political views and more importantly most people don’t want to read about it.  Filter your political views away from Planet Debian.

3.  If you believe the reason that Scott Brown won in MASS. is due to racism you couldn’t be further from the truth.  Mr. Brown ran an anti-Health Care, anti-Obama, anti-current administration campaign and defeated a Democrat running on a pro-Obama, pro-health care platform in a state that has voted Democratic since 1972.

Feel free to leave a comment here

Thank you former President and Former First Lady Bush

I’ve come across several blogs recently describing a visit from the former President and his wife to Fort Hood after the shootings that took place there.

At what point will the current President show up and spend time there?

It is funny on how people in the past argued that history would look back in kindest on President Bush and the author of this blog is now a fan:

We are now officially committed fans of George W. and Laura Bush.  We are fans of Dick Cheney.  Our gratitude for them makes us newly protective of them, and the continued role they play in this country.

At no time did President Bush or his wife make a grand speech with teleprompters and the press, or make a special trip to Dover complete with the press to watch bodies being back from war.  The president just went, as this blog reports

A couple of days ago I heard the news that George and Laura Bush paid a private visit to the wounded soldiers at Fort Hood. They specifically requested that the base commander not inform the media of their visit. They came. They comforted the wounded soldiers and the Fort Hood community for a couple of hours. And then they left. And they never had their pictures taken saluting the troops or holding their hands.

Dear President Obama, please respect our trips, please visit them outside of the press corps.  Please figure out what to do with the troops in Afghanistan.

Fox News didn’t like Van Jones cause he was black

I learned today that Fox News was against Van Jones because he was black.  Not because he was pro-communist, not because he he believed the government was behind 9-11 or because he called Republicans Assholes…  Nope it was because he was black.

 

I’m sorry but continuing these types of statements is just plain ignorant

End Trucking Trade War

In the editorial section of my local paper I learned about a little known success of President Bush’s that was overturned by the Democratic congress in the stimulus package.

According to the article, under the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States and Mexico agreed to open boarders to each other’s trucks.  A truck driver in Mexico could drive the truck across the border and keep driving.   The US already had a similar agreement with Canada.

In 2000 this arrangement between Mexico and the United States was supposed to go into effect, but the International Brotherhood of Teamsters blocked this.  Now what happens is a a Mexican truck driver has to offload any shipment in the United States and then the shipment needs to be loaded on an American truck.

Opponents of this argued that allowing a Mexican truck to drive in America is a safety risk and especially in a post-911 world it is a national security risk.  However these objections were more about loosing jobs for Teamsters and not about safety and security.

President Bush implemented a program in 2007 that allowed a limited amount of trucks from Mexico to continue driving.

This program all changed in the stimulus package the Democrats recently passed. 

Why should one care about this?  The government fought back against this by declaring a tariff (which it was allowed to do under NAFTA) for a total of $2.4 billion.  The state I’m from (Michigan) is one of those states affected by these tariffs.  The article states that Appleton Papers in Wisconsin supplies 75 percent of the paper that Mexico uses, now thanks to the tariffs laid against them, they are looking to lay people off

 

Thanks again for the Stimulus and bowing again to the Union

Bush Quietly Saved a Million African Lives

What if a president, on his own initiative, under no demands from staff or from supporters or opponents, set out to spend an unprecedented amount of money on AIDS in Africa, literally billions of dollars, at a time when the nation could not afford it, citing his faith as a primary motivation and, ultimately, saved more than a million lives?

I came across this post, from a Blogs for Victory posting and am amazed again that very few people are reporting on this.  I understand that everyone hates President Bush, but there are amazing things he and his presidency accomplished.

In January of 2003 during the State of the Union speech the President asked for $15 billion for AIDS in Africa and was given the money.

Was this just another failed governmental program?  The blog reports that over a million people were saved due to the actions taken by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and yet this program has received very little praise or press.  And it should be getting a lot.

Will we ever give President Bush credit for this?  He cut the death toll by 10% in targeted African countries.  A stunning but very quiet government success.

The White House wants us to report on each other

Welcome to the next level of hope and change, and big brother.

From a link from an email sent and the link from the White House page:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care.  These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation.  Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

So watch out neighbor, I may just have to report you to the government.

What is the next step?  Secret police knocking down our doors?

Happy July 4th – Read the Constitution and Deceleration of Independence

July 4th is tomorrow and for those in the United States it is the day we celebrate the United States declaring itself independent from Great Britain.  Before you head out to your picnics, fireworks, and family get together, please take time to read the two most important documents in our country’s history: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Full text of the Constitution can be found here

Full text of the Declaration can be found here

The preamble of Constitution sums everything up:

We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

And the opening of the Declaration of Independence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Enough with the prosecutions and investigations

I’ve read several places that President Obama is open to the idea of investigating and potentially prosecuting members of the Bush’ cabinet that authorized the use of torture at Gitmo and other places. By doing so we are crippling our intelligence community and also crippling those who server for the President.
Imagine the precedent this sets. One President disagrees with the policies of the former President, so he launches an investigation of his/her staff. Pretty soon, no one is willing to advise the President on anything for fear of being investigated and vilified.

What do the “torture” memos prove?

The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting editorial on what the memos recently released by Obama administration state about the torture techniques used by the CIA and others at Gitmo.

So what was waterboarding from the article:

The memos are also revealing about the practice of “waterboarding,” about which there has been so much speculative rage from the program’s opponents. The practice, used on only three individuals, involved covering the nose and mouth with a cloth and pouring water over the cloth to create a drowning sensation.

And the article continues on that the memos state the technique could only be used for about 40 seconds.

Remember the article from the International Red Cross about the United States “walling” terriorists by slaming them into a wall:

An Aug. 1, 2002, memo describes the practice of “walling” — recently revealed in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which suggested that detainees wore a “collar” used to “forcefully bang the head and body against the wall” before and during interrogation. In fact, detainees were placed with their backs to a “flexible false wall,” designed to avoid inflicting painful injury. Their shoulder blades — not head — were the point of contact, and the “collar” was used not to give additional force to a blow, but further to protect the neck.

Wow imaging that, we were actually protecting the neck, not injure the neck.  If these points are true, where is the Red Cross’s apology for spreading false stories?  Where is the rest of the people who spread these tales apologies?  I won’t hold my breath waiting on these.

In fact as the article contiues:

All of these interrogation methods have been adapted from the U.S. military’s own Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (or SERE) training program, and have been used for years on thousands of American service members with the full knowledge of Congress. This has created a large body of information about the effect of these techniques, on which the CIA was able to draw in assessing the likely impact on the detainees and ensuring that no severe pain or long term psychological impact would result.

So do we torture our own troops when we submit them to the SERE training?  And these things happen with full knowledge of Congress?  Imagine that…..