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Watch this blog in the coming weeks for a perspective on American politics and culture, the environment, the Middle East, relations with France and other tasty bits of information.

PJ

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And the Winner is: DOA

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The GOP is in the starting blocks, heralding the arrival of its Congressional majority by proclaiming President Obama's budget/legislative proposals as "dead on arrival." They say that the president's program is simply incapable of making it through the Republican dominated legislature. The implication of their message to the American people seems clear: why bother discussing any legislation at all? The argument is similar to the injury suffered by our democracy every time polls are taken and results presented to the country in advance of an election. Why bother debating competitive ideas when the decision is already made? The dream of representative democracy is lost, dead on arrival, as Jefferson and Madison turn over in their graves.
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Watch the Birdie or The Tiger and the Tush After months of procedural wrangling, the U.S. Senate finally began debate on the proposal by the Democratic party to overhaul the nation's health care system. The momentous occasion received dedicated coverage on most news media outlets, coming in third behind two other stories critical to the country: golfer Tiger Woods crashing his automobile and the party crashers at the Obama's first state dinner. For anyone who faithfully follows news reporting in the United States, it is not surprising that any story that contains the word "crash" in it will normally rise to the top of the pile on the cable channels on any given news day. The recipe is well known: start with some violence or greed; add a blond in a red dress (what I would call "a bit of tush"); mix in a billionaire sports figure cheating on his wife, and voila, the priorities of the TV viewing brain start to happily shift away from reality to the much more lu...
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Human Need, Human Greed One must be careful of brain damage while watching cable news. I tuned in recently to watch the daily coverage of the health care drama. There was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi presenting a woman who told a harrowing story about how she got cancer and how she went bankrupt after her insurance company refused to cover treatment. After five minutes they broke for commercials from Tax Masters, Binder and Binder, three pharmaceutical companies, and that idiot who sings for Free Credit Report dot com. That American society as a whole seems at times to be rather ill is evident in the health care reform debate. One has to marvel at the degree to which Americans are willing to be smacked down by the inequities of the system in order to pop back up and ask for more. Polls indicate that much of middle America is beginning to turn away from its initial support of the Obama health care plan after buying into the argument from the Republican Party that the plan will resu...
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