Tag: John Boehner

To prepare for this pandemic, our liberal and conservative leaders failed us

To prepare for this pandemic, our liberal and conservative leaders failed us

A lot of liberals won’t like this post. Please don’t read it if you are a liberal because you will get mad. It hurts when facts smack you in the face, so you should avoid doing that. This article points out that liberals completely failed to help the US prepare for a pandemic.

To be fair, conservatives shouldn’t read this post either because that same brick wall of facts is going to hit you in the face as well. Don’t read it as conservatives haven’t prioritized preparing for a pandemic either.

This is an article from 2009. It is from NPR, so no one is going to say it right-wing bias. Conservatives will say that it is MSM, but the facts on the ground have proven this article to be very accurate. 

Here is another article by Sheri Fink that covers the various studies in 2006-2009 about how woefully prepared the US is in handling a pandemic.

In 2007 and 2006, the country did studies that showed that during a pandemic, NYC would be short 15,000 ventilators, and 150K people could die. Sound familiar? There were probably studies since the publication of these articles. So did Bush or Obama do anything? Not much, and I will suggest they did zero. Trump didn’t come into office with any insight and initiative to fix this known problem, so he is just as guilty as Bush and Obama.

There has been a total lack of leadership by Bush, Obama, and Trump on this issue.

And Governor Cuomo? Nope. He didn’t fight for it either—more lack of leadership.

And neither did Pelosi, Reid, McConnell, Ryan, Boehner, Schumer, or any other leader of our Congress. A complete lack of leadership for a situation that everyone knew would eventually happen.

BTW, the current candidates for POTUS in 2020: Biden, Sanders, and Trump – nope. None of them did anything when they were in positions that could have influenced this.

All of our government leaders failed us on both sides of the aisle. They taxed the hell out of us. They whined and complained about other stupid shit. They gave incentives for solar energy, oil production, buying stuff on the internet, buying health insurance, fighting bad guys in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Syria. But prepare the country for a pandemic? Nope. 

They all said, “Hopefully, that pandemic will happen when I am not in office, and the next person can worry about that.” Guess what, we are the next person. We are now worrying about it, and our bickering Federal government messed up big time.

The Federal government is really only good at two things

  1. the infrastructure that hundreds of thousands or millions of people rely on
  2. the defense of our country and people.

To be honest, the government isn’t all that good at those two things, but it is the only entity that can do them. The government shouldn’t be doing other things. It should focus on doing those two things and do them as well as possible, giving the inefficiencies of an organization that has no competition.

It is woefully incapable of doing anything else well. In just about every case other than the two cited, private industry that competes with others will do a better job. Will the private sector screw something up? Absolutely! But then that private enterprise will be displaced by a competitor that will perform better. 

Pandemic relief falls into both categories. It is the defense of our people, and it is the infrastructure to support that defense. We did both poorly for pandemic relief, and it is now costing us dearly.

What is the solution? Throw the bums out. Every damn one of them. They failed us. They screwed up. They should be rewarded with losing their jobs.

We need politicians that are focused on just doing the two things that only the federal government can do. We need politicians to look at a bill and say, “Is this something that ONLY the federal government can do and therefore is in the above two categories?” If the answer to that question is NO, then the politicians need to vote it down. If the answer to that question is YES, then the politicians need to approve it and give it the appropriate funding and oversight that it is done as well as possible.

Header Photo by Parentingupstream (Pixabay)
House has decided to sue Executive Office

House has decided to sue Executive Office

supreme court photoI, for one, am glad that the House has decided to sue the President of the United States.

Congress has the exclusive authority to make law because lawmaking requires pluralism, debate and compromise, the essence of representative government. If Congress cannot achieve consensus, that doesn’t mean Congress is “broken.” A divided Congress reflects a divided people. Until there is a compromise acceptable to the majority, the status quo is the only correct path. An impasse emphatically does not warrant a president’s bypassing Congress with a pen and phone, as Mr. Obama claimed the power to do early this year.

The separation of powers also guarantees political accountability. When Congress makes a law and the president executes it as written, citizens will know whom to reward or punish at the next election.government branches photo

A president who unilaterally rewrites a bad or unworkable law, however, prevents the American people from knowing whether Congress should be praised or condemned for passing it. Such unconstitutional actions can be used to avert electoral pain for the president and his allies.

If Mr. Obama can get away with this, his successors will be tempted to follow suit. A Republican president, for example, might unilaterally get the Internal Revenue Service to waive collection of the capital-gains tax (something that I am personally in favor of but I know my more liberal friends would protest). Congress will be bypassed, rendering it increasingly irrelevant, and disfranchising the American people.

I am not going tgovernment branches photoo predict the winner of this suit here even though I have done it elsewhere more privately. The key learning from our government regardless of who wins this little battle is that no branch of the government has the right to completely ignore the other branches nor ignore a large minority or a small majority of the people.

Photo by Stephen D. Melkisethian

Photo by futureatlas.com

Photo by dbking

First thoughts on the day after election

First thoughts on the day after election

The massive mid-term election of 2010 is now over. My phone won’t ring 25 times today with some computer imploring me to vote for one candidate over another. The signs that are all along the streets in my town can come down (hopefully the candidates come out and clean up their mess). Life can now go back to some sort of normal.

The Republicans evidently picked up approximately 60 seats in the House of Representatives. They also made major increases in the Senate and that house appears to be split nearly 50/50 (the exact count probably won’t be known for a couple days as Alaska will probably take a while to count due to the write-in candidate).

What does this election mean? Does it mean that the 2-year era of liberalism is over? Does it mean that conservatism is the rule of the day? Does it mean that Barack Hussein Obama will lose in 2 years? Does it mean that the Republicans have a mandate to go ultra-conservative? Does it mean that the poor and down-trodden will need to look for their medicine in the trash cans of the homes of the wealthy? Does it mean that I have to give up drinking coffee and now drink tea?

What I am 100% confident in is that it doesn’t mean any of the above! It doesn’t mean that BHO is done. It doesn’t mean that all of healthcare should just go to the wealthiest. It doesn’t mean that we should now savage the environment.

I don’t think that the newly elected Republicans have a mandate at all except for the mandate to do a good job and figure out the best way to solve each individual problem regardless of party direction.

I think it means that Americans want a government that works. We want it to work rather slowly and deliberately. We want politicians that don’t act like politicians but rather act like leaders. We want compromise to be the rule of the day. We want our leaders to read, understand, and thoughtfully debate the bills that are before them. We don’t want to find out about what is in the bill after it is turned into law – we want our leaders to know what is in the bill before they make it a law.

We don’t want stagnation. If Boehner drives the government to a stall the way that Gingrich did, that would be a mistake.

Most of all, I think Americans don’t want to deal with the federal government. We don’t want our lives to be tied up with governing. Life is hard enough with births, jobs, bills, lousy bosses, teenagers, sickness, and death – we don’t want to worry about the feds as well. I think most Americans would be perfectly happy if government would just get out of our lives with the exception of keeping us safe, making sure the infrastructure works, and helping out with the truly disadvantaged. We will pay a reasonable tax for that as long as we think it is well managed.

I raise my coffee cup in a salute to the Tea Party activists for energizing America in making their point. That point, I believe, is that we want our legislators to pay attention to us, don’t tax us to death, and spend what you need but make sure what you buy is needed. 2 years ago, pundits were saying that the Republican party was dead, now the pundits need to say, “Listen to your constituents if you want to keep your job.” 

There is no such thing as a mandate to do radical things. Extremism is a bad position no matter which side of the scale you are on.

If the grown men and women in the federal government can’t get along better than a bunch of nursery school kids, then we will take away their ball and send a new bunch of children to Washington in 2 years.