DEFINITELY HEADED THE WRONG DIRECTION

Well as you know my vote on the Health Care plan has been swinging in the ballance like a loose pendulum. But today two definitive actions of the US Senate have pretty much insured which way my vote will swing when the moment counts, and that is to vote in the negative. As of today I as a California senator would vote a reluctant "No" on the Democratic Senate health care bill. The two actions today are as follows. The public option was scrapped. This was part of a "compromise" move to secure the elusive vote of that sixtieth senator, Joe Obstructionist Lieberman. I hope the people at KTLK don't lose their testosterone or overies as the case may be and somehow rationalize this bad decision. It would be as if they voted a civil right's bill that said that Blacks would not be covered by the provisions of this bill. As far as I'm concerned, if I ever heard the news I heard today, that would be the ballgame. There will be no public option. So yes, a health care bill will be passed to "give Obama a victory" but all it will do is blow a few beaths of Rush Limbaugh hot air into Nome, Alaska when the people were hoping for something more substantive like central heating. Glen Beck exhailed a few breaths of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide the other day to illustrate the utter absurdity of the cerbon tax. Today's bill development is about as absurd. The other cute little move is to defeat the Hatch abortion amendment. I thought abortion was off the table, but someone found the fleeing patient and strapped her back on the opperating table. So now women will be able to sign up for abortion plans they couldn't afford before - because of this bill. It's a deal breaker for this writer.

Dana Rorebocker was speaking tonight on this whole cap and trade movement. He doesn't want congress to surrender its sovreignty for some internationalist agency of some sort of a perternal all encompassing nature - regulating all sorts of aspects of American commerce. India and China of course would not be subject to these provisions. So the "giant sucking sound" that Ross Perot warned of in 1992 will only become more pronounced as even more industrialists take their jobs off shore to areas where they can practice their pollution without US interference. I sometimes wonder whether there is a "Hate America" movement throughout the world. They seem to regard the United States as the ultimate sugar daddy "sucker" of all time!

It seems this anti American feeling as even pervaided the courts of Italy. They voted to convict Amanda Knox of pre-meditated murder even though they didn't sequester the jury or even screen then for bias. And they were allowed to read newspapers and have biases going into this case. And they say there was NO forensic evidence Amanda Knox was even at the murder scene with not so much as a speck of DNA. The case is on appeal and the concencus now is that she won't get the 26 year sentense but this will be reduced to about ten. Italians in the tradition of Stephano Di Mira call americans "errogant", which usually means they know we are morally superior and resent us for our superiority - - but they'd rather name call than face reality.

Name calling was on Rush Limbaugh's aganda today. I didn't hear any of today's program escept for excerpts on the Randy Rhodes show. It would seem that Rush Limbaugh in one stroke compared Tiger Woods to President Obama saying that they were both losers, and neither one was good at their appointed jobs. And because both Woods and the President were of "mixed race" they were necessarily "unhappy people" and in the case of the President, left only a wake of misery for all the Black People who supported the President hoping for an economic recovery and are now disappointed. When I heard that "mixed race" line I cringed. Does Rush Limbaugh really want to set race relations back fifty years where a White's worse fear, over and above Black people - is people of mixed race? It is Rush Limbaugh's greatest dread that this economy might recover from this recession. Indeed signs of recovery are becomming more apparent every day and now the President himself is fanning the fires of recovery anew in his new jobs program, where he had launched a new round of economic stimuli. Congress will have to pass the new stimulus measures, but that appears to be no problem. The President wants to do more to directly help small business and "free up credit". But also people want to take some of the recovered TARP money and spend it where it will count. But now the Republicans say "This money should be used to reduce the deficet". But we are reminded that many who passed the Bush tax cuts of 2001 did so to "give back the [Clinton] surplusses to the people who "over paid". Ha! Randy Rhodes is right in that if you placed bets on "who will be proved right" in the upcoming months it will not be Rush Limbaugh and the other nattering nabobs of negativism or the right wing, including Glen Beck.

Now some "Good Guys" institute issued a report against the Zu-Zu hamster pet toys that are so popular for Christmas this year saying that they had dangerous amounts of Antimony. This is a element that is closely related to Arsnic. But the agency did not conform to government procedures in testing, and today it was agreed by one all that the toys are not dangerous.

Yesterday an agency of the Obama Administration officially decreed that we indeed were suffering from Global Warming and that we should institute all of these "carbon footprint" measures that have been talked about. Meanwhile we here in Southern California have been going through a protracted cold spell, and the cold weather is expected to last all week. This could be the best ski season in the High Sierra that they've had in years.