Republicians:
Until you accept responsibility for taking a budget surplus and creating a budget deficit from it, I’m not listening to a single word you say about fiscal responsibility

My fiancee has no health care not because she thinks she’s invincible, but because she can’t afford it. The problem doesn’t lie with how much she makes, but with how expensive health care costs are (like the $75 we were charged for a doctor to look at the results of a $300+ test, not to talk to her about it just to look at the paper sent back to him from a lab). Do something about that.

Back to the deficit for a minute, a big part of where it came from (since your memories don’t seem to go past last January) was the Medicare prescription drug plan you enacted and didn’t pay for. Sure Obama’s spending freeze will only affect a small percent of the deficit, that’s because the biggest part of it is health care related.

Right now, I’m still assuming you do want to do what’s right for the people, but based on all I’ve seen and heard from you, you don’t want the Democrats and specifically Obama to get any credit so you’re doing everything you can to drag your feet and ensure they fail so you can be back in power and then you’ll actually do something. No. We need you to act now.

Obama and the Democrats:
You weren’t elected to work with Republicans. You were elected because we didn’t like what they were doing and wanted to give you a chance. So do something already. Even if you lost eight more Senate seats you would still have a majority. Make them filibuster.

See what I said above about health care.

One one hand we hear Clinton proclaiming internet access a human right and on the other we have Music and Movie Industry Lawyers the Justice Department saying that even an accusation of online copyright infringement should result in being banned from the internet.

Repeal all the laws enacted over the past eight years giving the executive branch the power to violate our rights.

Nice job on the State of the Union, Obama.

Tea Partiers and Fox “News”:
Where were your protests when Bush and the Republicans created the deficit? Oh that’s right, back then questioning the president was un-American. Sure Obama has added to it, but part of that addition gave me (and most Tea Party attendees and probably none of the Fox “News” hosts) a tax cut. Yes, Obama’s evil stimulus package put more money in your pocket. Go back and check your pay stubs.

The census? Really? That’s how the government is going to gather information on you so they can round you up? Thanks to Bush and the Republicans, Obama has the authority to listen in on all of your phone calls and read everything you post online. He doesn’t need the census. If he hadn’t nixed it, he’d also have the power to declare you an unlawful enemy combatant, lock you up, and throw away the key and you’d have no recourse to challenge that decision. Fight that fight, not the census.

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I could go on and on, but I have better things to do (like write up my thoughts on the iPad).

And where was your fear that your freedoms were being taken away when Bush decided, backed up by Congress, that the president could declare anyone, including you, an unlawful enemy combatant and then imprison you for life without recourse? When he decided that the Fourth Amendment and the laws enacted by Congress in support thereof can be ignored? When he decided that your First Amendment right could be curtailed and confined to special Free Speech Zones? When he decided that the military could be used as a police force in the U.S. without any regard to any restrictions in the Bill of Rights?

If Bush were still president he could have sent the military to your tea parties, declared you all unlawful enemy combatants and sent you to Gitmo for the rest of your lives. Not any more though. Bush restored posse comitatus on his way out the door and Obama has dismissed the unlawful enemy combatant designation. True Obama has continued to fight to keep the illegal wiretapping and surveillance laws. But then that doesn’t seem to be why you’re protesting.

In fact, why are you protesting? Is it because you make over $150,000 and so haven’t just gotten a tax cut? Is it because you slept through the election day last November and so missed out on your chance to vote (and don’t realize that there is another federal election next year)? Is it because you didn’t think to contact your representatives and senators and the president with an alternative plan to deal with the economic crisis?

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A mostly unrelated addendum. Cries are starting to go out about how if defense spending goes down, we will be less safe. Apparently the only way to keep us safe is to throw money at the Pentagon. Whereas every year public education is told that they don’t need more money or even the same money as the previous year, they just need to spend a smaller amount of money better. Because if public education spending goes down it certainly won’t make us less smart.

You know that flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.

We may have lost our way, done some of those things we wouldn’t and shouldn’t do (such as forgetting that we were founded on the idea that all Men, regardless of nationality, are endowed with inalienable rights), but we’re about to take that first big step on the road home.

I’ve spent most of my creative life measuring the distance between that American promise and American reality. For many Americans, who are today losing their jobs, their homes, seeing their retirement funds disappear, who have no healthcare, or who have been abandoned in our inner cities, the distance between that promise, and that reality, has never been greater or more painful.

The whole set in Philidelphia can be seen here

In discussions with RAW STORY, the whistleblower — who wishes to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — said that he became suspicious of Diebold’s actions in Georgia for two reasons. The first red flag went up when the computer patch was installed in person by Diebold CEO Bob Urosevich, who flew in from Texas and applied it in just two counties, DeKalb and Fulton, both Democratic strongholds.

(Raw Story via SpyTalk)

The program’s clearest focus is politics, especially in Washington. U.S. foreign affairs, largely dominated by the Bush Administration’s policies in Iraq, Washington politics and government accounted for nearly half (47%) of the time spent on the program. Overall, The Daily Show news agenda is quite close to those of cable news talk shows.

Some other very interesting results there which you may also find (not) so surprising. (via)

He was not corrected any of those times of course (though in the write up online, “sic” was at least inserted following each mention). He also did a masterful job of not answering the direct question of whether or not Bush would attend the ceremonies, implying though that he would.

And since I’m on it anyway, Jimmy Carter, questioned about the comparison with our boycott of the 1980 Olympics said the situation was not the same at all. Back then it was because a country’s military had just started to invade a sovereign nation. The difference being apparently that the sovereign nation of Tibet was completely invaded by another country’s military over 50 years ago. Who cares about something that happened that far in the past?

We fought for less than two years in World War I and lost 116,708 soldiers
During the four years of our involvement in World War II we lost 416,800 soldiers
We fought in Korea for three years and lost 36,516 brave souls
For the first five years of major combat operations in Vietnam (1964-1969) 35,957 men and women gave their lives.

So the loss of 4,000 soldiers during five years of fighting makes this war the least deadly war we’ve fought in the last 100 years (and a quick look further back reveals that it may be second only to the War of 1812 overall).

UPDATE: As current reports focus on the death toll, I did, as noted in a comment, leave out the wounded figures. To give the more complete perspective, let’s look at those too.

Currently in Iraq, 29,451 Americans have been wounded (more than half of whom returned to duty within three days).
In World War I, 204,002 were wounded.
For World War II, the figure rose to 671,846.
In Korea, 103,284 suffered non-fatal wounds.
I can’t find a year by year breakdown of WIA figures for Vietnam, but averaging out the total number gives us about 85,168 for five years.

So the number of wounded over five years is also significantly less than any major conflict of the past century and the ratio of deaths to wounded is significantly greater (1:7.3 versus the previous high of the Korean war 1:2.8).

A total of three reporters showed up over two days to hear from officials such as Leonard Boyle who runs the Terrorist Screening Center, Charlie Allen — the chief intelligence officer for the Department of Homeland Security, and Los Angeles police chief William Bratton. THREAT LEVEL was the only media outlet to show up two days running, and neither of San Francisco’s dailies sent a reporter.