HOPE

[A Black Falcon]

This country is very, very fortunate that people like you have a small and shrinking role in deciding national policy, that's for sure. Reagan is gone, Reaganomics is a total failure, and Dick Cheney is a (sadly indicted) war criminal.

Oh, and whoever mentions Hitler first in a discussion automatically loses... :)

Spending more money than ever in our history ... money we don't have.

And if we didn't spend it, we'd be many times worse off in a couple of years. The only thing wrong with the ~$700 billion stimulus bill was that it had too much tax cuts in it and was too small. See, tax cuts are in fact the least effective form of economic stimulus. The most effective form? Food stamps. Something Republicans wanted to cut out of the stimulus bill.

What Obama should have done is instead of starting with a deeply flawed bill that was already nearly 50% tax cuts, he should have started with NO tax cuts in the bill. Then, when Snowe, Collins, and Spector said that they needed some tax cuts in it in order to support the bill, they'd have gotten them... but the total mix would have been dramatically better, with a lot more spent on stimulus and a lot less on less effective tax cuts. It's really too bad that Obama actually thought that Republicans would work with him... it should have been obvious that they have absolutely no intention of doing anything to actually try to fix our country's problems.

Creating the biggest debt in history.

Bush II did that, actually.

Reagan before him was almost as bad.

Obama won't come close to matching either, I expect. Certainly not Bush II, at any rate.

# Causing an inevitable wave of inflation which WILL happen, according to the laws of finance and economics

Long-term economic depression is something to be avoided. There's a reason that people vote against people saying things like you are when the country is in awful financial shape -- people finally see how much damage Republican policies are doing, and how little they are helping most people. So they vote Democratic, and ignore the increasingly smaller and more radical Republican party.

The worst part of the Great Depression came when FDR weakened his stimulus efforts and increased taxes, with the goal of coming closer to balancing budgets, in 1938... it was a total disaster and the country quickly plunged into the depths of depression. It's to avoid things like that that people elected Obama. So far he's doing an okay job, mostly good. The point is, we must do things to stabilize the economy and finance because to not do anything would be to invite much greater disaster. The government isn't spending all this money because it really wants to... it's doing it because it absolutely has to.

Scaring away the people he desperately needs to attract: investors.

Not the last time I checked...

Four!!! differnet cabinet appointees now charged as tax cheats!

Kind of strange, but not overly important.

# The stock market plunges every time he or one of his cabinet members open their mouths ... it's like clock work to watch.

What, going up four days in a row last week, and then only barely down today, doesn't mean anything?

Look, the economy is in terrible shape, and Obama's financial team's policies could use some work. They just sound a bit too much like Bush's, on things like bank rescue packages, for people to like them, even with the somewhat changed focus... and Geithner isn't exactly a great public speaker either.

But really, it's because the economy is in very bad shape. You can't turn that around overnight. These things take time.

# Oh, and he's using a crisis to force through a socialist agenda that has nothing to do with economic revitalization ... quite the opposite, actually.

I very, very much wish that Obama actually was in favor of socialized medicine (the only major aspect of socialism truly in consideration right now), because this country desperately needs it, but sadly, he isn't. That he wasn't,while most other Democrats running for President were, was one thing I disliked about him, in the primaries... but ultimately, the president doesn't write health care reform. Congress does. So we'll see what congress comes up with... hopefully it'll be the kind of dramatic reform and improvement that we need. Because healthcare is in critically bad shape in this country right now, and we need dramatic change. Costs are ridiculously high, results average at best. Our healthcare system is now below even Cuba's now, on average!

And fortunately, the American people realize this now. It's really too bad that this didn't get through in 1993, but hopefully we can make up for it now... public support is clearly much greater now, so chances are good. But on the other hand, HMOs have a lot (of profits) to lose, so there'll be a massive lobbying effort against it... hopefully it won't work, but with Washington the way it is, I wouldn't bet on anything. :(

And, of course, all our enemies (Iran, North Korea, Russia) are rattling their sabres and laughing at this rookie in the office. His letter to Putin was nothing less than treasonous, an affront to our staunch Eastern European allies and likely to plunge us into a war.

Cheney's the one who wanted war with Iran, not Obama. If you try to say that you missed the outstanding world reaction to Bush finally being gone, and Obama in, then you're lying. Russia? The US and Russia have been drifting apart ever since Putin got power in 2000 and began to crush opposition again. Of course they're not friendly right now.

But we've got an outstanding foreign policy team in place, from Joe Biden, probably the most knowlegable person on the issue of foreign policy in the US senate up until his departure, to Hillary Clinton and the AAA-class focus specialists we now have, from George Mitchell (broker of the Good Friday Accords that created peace in Ireland, after hundreds and hundreds of conflict, among many other things) in the Middle East to Richard Holbrooke (one of America's best and most respected diplomats, and behind the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian War) in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Christopher Hill (another very good diplomat) as ambassador to Iraq.

No, there's a fantastic foreign policy team in place. Probably Russia has been testing things a bit, as Biden predicted before the election, but Obama's responses so far have been appropriate and measured, despite the degree of pressure. Russia's hurting a lot now too, you know, thanks to the collapse in oil prices and the financial collapse... they don't have the kinds of cash now they would have when oil prices were higher and their wealthy classes hadn't been so hard hit.

The letter to Putin was an attempt to lower tensions, not raise them. Anyone who has any knowledge of the situation would know that. You do know that in diplomacy you start by saying one thing, they start by saying some other thing, and then you slowly work towards a resolution, right? You really think that it would be a good idea to go ahead with that missile shield, even knowing how seriously Russia does not want that to happen and the very serious threats they have made in the event that it did (putting their own missiles right on the Polish border, for example)? No, I think that talking about it instead, and trying to come to terms, is the right course of action, and that's exactly what Obama is trying. Just because the Bush administration was incompetent and unable to see anything other than good or evil doesn't mean that the world works that way... certainly some people do very horrible things, and not everything can be forgiven or explained, but we need to work with Russia. Alienating them and angering them isn't the way to do it. Talking to them is.

Hah, only Republicans would say that attempts to patch back together the dangerously bad state of US-Russian relations are somehow actually making things worse. Is it always opposite day in Republican-land or something? :)

I know that anti-missile missile shields have been a core bit of Republican military spending ever since Reagan's 'Star Wars', but after so long, and with so little success to show for it (after all that money, it'd still be likely to fail), and with so much money spent, Democrats are, as much or more than ever, seriously skeptical of the sense of continuing with these plans.

Putting our efforts into making people hate us less is a better policy. Of course the Iranian government is a major threat right now, and their nuclear program a serious concern, but this Eastern European missile shield isn't worth it if it does as much damage to US-Russian relations as it seems to be doing. We need to find better ways to hopefully keep the Iranians from getting, much less using, nuclear weapons... hopefully we can, it definitely isn't looking good.

Of course, on the other hand Iran's people are actually less anti-American in some ways than the people of many so-called "friendly" Arab nations are, and their governmental system, while unfree and controlled by the clerics, has a greater democratic element than other Middle Eastern nations, Israel excepted. So even with nukes, it's not necessarily true that Iran would fire them at Israel, knowing that they would be devastated in return... of course, the best thing would be to keep the situation from coming up at all, but it does make me think of learning about America's fears of China getting the bomb, back in the 1950s. A lot of people thought that the Chinese government was insane and evil and would use nukes irregardless of the consequences, as soon as they got them...

And then they got nuclear weapons and did nothing of the sort. In a worst-case scenario where Iran gets a nuclear weapon, let's hope that that holds true there too... it well could. The Iranian government isn't absolute evil or anything... bad, but not even as bad as the Saudi government, really, overall. Of course, the Saudis are one of the worst in the world, as are the Chinese, and they're our "friends"... hopefully we can find a way to come to terms with Iran again. Maybe not, but hopefully.