Governor Sanford has flunked the IQ test for all elected officials. He abrogated his duties as a sworn government official, misappropriated tax-payer funds, took a state law enforcement vehicle for his personal use, lied to his staff and state legislators, and abandoned his own children on Father's Day weekend. Someone that stupid shouldn't be allowed to run a city, much less an entire state.

I'm shocked by some of the blogs I've been reading today, in the wake of Obama's Cairo speech. The amount of racist-driven hatred for the President in evidence there is shocking. Here's a man who has made it crystal clear that he was raised Christian and has publicly expressed his acceptance of Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, yet numerous bloggers are referring to him today as a Muslim who is bent on "selling out" our country by capitulating to the Islamic world. In one blog, the President was referred to as the "Magic Mau Mau".  It's shocking, upsetting and frightening that so many of our fellow citizens still carry a pre-Civil War mindset.

I applaud President Obama for exploiting his familial connection to Islam in order to leverage better relations with the Muslim world. I saw not one word in his speech that could be construed to be even the tiniest concession. It was an important and refreshing U-turn away from the divisive, jingoistic and unproductive policies of the previous administration. Obama's primary job is to protect Americans. If he can convince even one young Muslim that we are not his enemy, that is one less potential terrorist recruit.  

"A house divided cannot stand."

Political ideology breeds ignorance and intolerance. These anti-embryonic stem cell research people are THINK they are protecting human life when, in reality, they are advocating the continued suffering of millions of men, women and children around the world. They know nothing about the nature of this research, nor do they understand that millions of embryos are lost medically every year. The fact that some will be used in this research to save the lives of fully developed human beings with families should be cause for great joy, not political drum-beating. Because of this decision, in ten years, Michael J. Fox might be able to perform again, or Muhammad Ali might be able to speak to the world. It is grotesquely sad that some people are so easily misled by pseudo moral imperatives which are based upon nothing other than the opinion of some person who is basing their opinion on what somebody else thinks.

I think it's rather curious how some people choose to define the President's bill in their own way, then criticize it using their own made-up criteria.  I would be interested in hearing what some of them think an "emergency stimulus" bill would include, other than the government immediately mailing out checks to everybody. All the armchair economists here post comments like "we need to take our medicine", "the government shouldn't bail-out anybody",  and "just cut taxes". Clearly, they don't get the gravity of the situation.  In the past, those things might've worked because the government had the option of lowering interest rates to stimulate borrowing. Rates are already nearly at zero, yet nobody is lending.

So why fix roads and bridges if people can still drive on them? Why repair schools if none of the roofs have collapsed? Why develop alternative fuels if gas prices have gone down?  Use your head. This country spends a lot of money every year monitoring the environment as a way of protecting the population. The technicians who do that work spend money and pay taxes. The hallmark of Obama's philosophy in developing the stimulus package was to provide necessary services while creating jobs. Maybe you, in your parochial arrogance, don't think monitoring volcanoes is all that essential. That's just ignorance talking.

I've known many people who have advanced degrees from Ivy League schools and some of them have no common sense at all. Academics are supremely capable of doing and saying stupid things. In Jindal's case, as smart as he may be, he agreed to make a positively abysmal speech and deliver it like a grammar school teacher. In the process of doing that, he was glib about an issue that many Americans are smart enough to realize is important.

By the way, it's "cabeza". Dope.

I wonder if Jindal would have attacked a $150 million provision in the stimulus package to study and better predict hurricanes in the Caribbean and along the Gulf Coast? And I wonder if he realizes something else:  "The spending could provide new jobs "no different than the amount of money you would spend on building a street or building a bridge or something," said Danny Boston, an economist at Georgia Tech university in Atlanta, Georgia.  

OK. Obama's speech was, as usual, articulate, inspiring, genuine and unifying. What's new? So let's talk about Jindal's incredible response to the President's speech. Wow. I just have one question: Is Jindal the governor of a state or a 1st grade teacher? While I was watching him, I worried that he was going to lapse in baby-talk... goo-goo, ga-ga, Obama poopy. Seriously, have you ever seen such a simplistic, patronizing and manipulative performance by any politician? If Jindal was the GOP's rising star, we just saw it collapse into a black hole. "We believe in you"? That is called a platitude. And, when Jindal stated that the Republican Party doesn't agree that government is the solution for our problems, he was ignoring a gaggle of Nobel Prize-winning economists. He was also implying that Obama's solution simply calls for bigger government, i.e. socialism. This, of course, was a distortion of the truth. Most of the programs in the stimulus will be executed by the private sector and involve projects from which the public will greatly benefit. So, what we saw Jindal do was attempt to spin the President's speech in a typically partisan manner. So, we are left with the kind of double-speak we are accustomed to hearing from the GOP-- "We are ready and willing to work with the President to solve the nation's problems, but...".  

I think every single Republican in the House and Senate knew that the stimulus bill was going to pass, with or without their vote. So, the GOP opted to vote en masse against the bill in order to preserve their political 'reason for being'.  Agreeing with anything that the Obama administration wants to do just dissolves away more of their party's reason to exist at all. This tactic, of course, is going to back-fire big time because voters, especially red state voters, are going to remember that these politicians voted to protect their party rather than the people who voted for them.

The person who angers me the most here isn't John McCain, who's the same guy who told the American people just a few months ago that Sarah Palin was fully prepared to step into the presidency. McCain has proven himself to be an impaired personality. I am disgusted with John Boehmer. This raging liar has stated publicly that he presented President Obama with an alternative stimulus package that would have created twice as many jobs and cost half as much as Obama's bill. Of course, NOBODY knows what that package entailed, except you can bet it involved a lot of tax cuts for corporations. The Republicans continue to operate on the assumption that companies will always do what's right for the country.  This is the same logic that Phil Graham used when he pushed through his massive de-regulation legislation in 1999. These are the same kind of assumptions that got us into this mess in the first place. Boehmer is liar. The GOP is in its death throes.