SOME QUICK THOUGHTS

1. As my friend the artist Paul Harryn pointed out to me in conversation (and I had been thinking of myself), if those of us who were against many of the past administration’s policies showed up to protest them at one of Junior’s speeches we would have been prevented from entering.

2. Or if we did manage to get in and tried to protest we would have either been escorted out by security and/or called “traitors” for going against “our” president, or arrested (remember the couple who were arrested for wearing John Kerry tee shirts to a Bush Jr. speech?).

3. It’s interesting that the main rightwing troll on this blog started referring to our current president as “The Joker” as if this was his own thought, but then at these so-called grassroots town hall protests over healthcare there on the TV news we can see preprinted posters of Obama as The Joker. Hmmmm.

4. Here’s an interesting statistic. For all the rightwingers who are stirring their obviously ill-informed followers to scream about the growing deficit: the biggest deficit in our history to that time, bigger than all previous deficits combined, was created under their hero Reagan, partly because when he became president he slashed taxes: “the top federal marginal rate plummeted from 70% in 1980 to 28% in 1988. (It’s now 35%)” (according to a TIME magazine article.)

5. Of course they always leave out that under Reagan this country had the worst recession in modern history, until this one that was created under Bush Jr. In fact, if we go back over my lifetime, the worst recessions occurred under Republican administrations, and the greatest prosperity occurred under Democratic administrations. And if you look at the facts (see this article in today's NY Times) and not the rightwing media, Obama has already headed off what could have been another Great Depression with his policies (the so-called “stimulus” which has only been partially spent so far has already, according to several independent economic research groups, created 500,000 jobs and slowed unemployment and turned around the stock market, the auto industry and several other sectors of the economy).

6. One last thought: did you notice that the first screamers at town hall meetings were the ones who were insisting Obama was born in Kenya? But when that was debunked as a total hoax, they looked around for other faux causes to create havoc and the illusion of “grassroots” movements and found that by telling seniors the government will kill them (!) if healthcare reform goes through, etc. they finally hit a nerve.

PS: And by the way, to all my rightwing friends who continue to try and characterize the modest and moderate healthcare reform that has been proposed so far as some sort of “socialist” (or “fascist”—they can’t make up their minds and obviously have no knowledge of history, and what an insult that the people comparing Obama to Hitler look like Hitler’s followers and Obama like his victims) government takeover, if they have such a strong belief in keeping the government out of everything, let them refuse to accept Medicare, or Social Security, or support mining companies and logging companies that use federal lands for way under the open market price, and all other government programs that Western states, including Alaska, reap the benefits of (more of our federal tax dollars go to red state than blue states, but more of our federal taxes come from blue states than red states! Maybe it’s time we separated into two countries, one for the rightwingers where they can have a government that doesn’t offer any help to the poor or uninsured or regulations for corporations etc. and is in fact run by corporations etc. and one for the rest of us reasonable and well reasoning people who accept that government needs to take part in regulating the open-ended greed of corporate shortsightedness and help those in need, etc.).