30 January 2010
Obama 'owns' all comers at Republican meeting
That his stellar performance will change obstructionist Republicans still doubtful


President Obama kicked Republican ass Friday afternoon in Baltimore--no doubt about it.  He demonstrated a vast intellect and a capacity to integrate thousands of facts and concepts into cogent arguments. He remained Joe Cool throughout and took on all comers successfully at the GOP retreat.

I have my doubts still that obstructionist Republicans will see the light now and cooperate in the bipartisan fashion Obama envisions. I hope I am wrong and I will be the first to so admit, should the president win Republicans over to his health care and other vital programs.

D. Grant Haynes


Posted by DGrantHaynes at 6:25 PM | Link | 0 comments
27 January 2010
Obama's State of the Union address
Obama a Democratic centrist moving to right as quickly as possible

I watched President Obama's State of the Union address tonight. He was, as always, a gifted orator and communicator.

But he remains naively optimistic that he can woo obstructionist Republicans into cooperation on his major programs by invoking a warm and fuzzy sense of kumbaya bipartisanship in the name of what is best of the American people. That will never occur.

Most of Obama's address was devoted to a new and excessive appeal to fiscal conservatism--one born, no doubt, of the recent election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

Obama promised a three-year fiscal freeze in federal budgets beginning in 2011 (military spending exempted, of course), expanded tax credits for middle class parents with enough income to send children to college in the first place, and various job creation schemes with an emphasis always on the importance of the "private sector" in job creation.

He also assented to Republican talking point issues such as offshore drilling, new nuclear power plants, and that monumental oxymoron of our time, "clean coal technology". 

Obama soft peddled the health care issue during his address, not mentioning it for the first 30 minutes of his 70-minute speech and then only in general terms. He made no demands of Republicans. He threatened no passage by reconciliation of health care in the face of continued Republican opposition. He only begged them to cooperate in passing some sort of health care reform because of the crying needs of the American people. That approach will not sway Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, or Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Those politicians are bent on destroying Obama and his legislative agenda, as DeMint indicated in a recent interview. I doubt they and their constituents were moved by Obama's silver tongued oratory tonight.  

I heard nothing to cause me to believe life will become any less stressful for a man such as myself who has to live on $12,000 annually--one who has had no dental insurance for 20 years and is about to lose all of his teeth because Medicare pays for one set of dentures in a retiree's lifetime and for no other dental work--one who is expected to pay 20 percent of the cost of any medical procedure, however expensive, or be referred to a medical collection agency, even as he approaches three score and ten years.

No, Barrack Obama is definitely not a socialist or a champion of the down and outs of this nation. He cannot identify with poverty and lack. He is centrist Democratic politician who is crab crawling to the right as fast as possible because of apparent political trends in this nation of unthinking knee jerk reactive fools.

I want to live in a socialist society or a social democracy at the very least. I want to live where I can receive generous dental and medical care because I am a human being and deserving of it--not because I am financially able to augment my Medicare with private supplemental dental, ocular, and medical insurance.

I want socialism--not Barack Obama's watered down centrist version of corporatized capitalism, the best the Democratic Party of this nation dares to hope for or strive to achieve.

Should I ever vote here again, I will not be voting for a Democrat or a Republican. The similarities of the aims, goals, and platforms of these major American political parties far outweigh their largely cosmetic differences.

I am as disgusted as hell with the entire process and, as I often write, truly grateful I don't have too much longer to tarry here.

Perhaps Nostradamus and the Mayans were right about 2012. I hope so.

D. Grant Haynes

Posted by DGrantHaynes at 11:43 PM | Link | 0 comments
21 January 2010
I would leave America tomorrow, if possible
Nothing will ever improve here

January 19, 2010

Never have I been more weary of America and Americans than I am tonight.

The special election outcome in Massachusetts underscored once more for me that nothing will ever improve here.

I'm probably too old and poor to leave this putrid nation of shallow Fox News following fools who, with or without health care coverage themselves, will vote the best of men and women out of office on the "socialized medicine" issue.

Most blue collar Americans--the kinds that put Scott Brown into office in Massachusetts--could not define "socialism" or "socialized medicine" if pressed. But these ignorant fools have been brainwashed for generations that they don't want either, even if they themselves and persons close to them are often dying for lack of medical care or are losing their homes because of non-payment of medical bills.

These stalwart champions of the "American way of life"--ignoramuses all--are as certain as their grandfathers were before them that they don't want "socialized medicine". They voted Martha Coakley down in Massachusetts today primarily because she represented the party of President Barack Obama, who is, in the eyes of the truck drivers, carpenters, plumbers and day laborers of Western Massachusetts, a Muslim, a socialist, and probably an alien not born in their "Amurka"--one bent on forcing "socialism" onto them.

I wish to be as far as possible from these ignorant people and their smutty little working class Bay State neighborhoods--as far as the globe is wide and its circumference great.

I would remove myself to New Zealand, if  that were possible. A more plausible relocation target might be Canada--an alternative I am investigating at this time.

I do not wish to transition to another energy system from the United States of America. I do not wish my ashes dispersed here. I do not wish to have been a despised American as I disembark on the other shore. I detest everything about this nation.

D. Grant Haynes


Posted by DGrantHaynes at 1:15 AM | Link | 0 comments
10 January 2010
Watch powerful statement against Iraq occupation
Iraq veteran Mike Prysner condemns Iraq War, motivations of government waging it
Posted by DGrantHaynes at 3:51 AM | Link | 0 comments
03 January 2010
Indians more alarmed about global pollution than greedy, blind Americans
I should have fought the madness with more than a belated pen

(From the Times of India)

Climate change far worse than thought before

3 January 2010, 12:09pm IST

NEW DELHI: Global alarm over climate change and its effects has risen manifold after the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Since then, many of the 2,500-odd IPCC scientists have found climate change is progressing faster than the worst-case scenario they had predicted... .

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/environment/global-warming/Climate-change-far-worse-than-thought-before/articleshow/5406955.cms


Even the Indians with their unimaginable population and poverty pressures will come to their senses about global pollution before greedy, self-centered, and wholly hedonistic Americans do.

Of course the global pollution crisis is worse than business-as-usual capitalists and their sycophantic bureaucratic followers in Congress will admit.

I, personally, have learned that there is nowhere left to run in North America to escape choking, killing air pollution.  I've tried every quadrant.

We are all screwed now for following the siren songs of the business community that told us for the last 50 years that more and bigger was always better.

How many times was I told in my youth, "well, you can't stop progress and that building, (or strip mall or paper mill or coal plant or whatever) represents progress."?  Far too many times.

And far too many times did I accept the lie of open-ended economic growth and industrial prosperity as a panacea when I should have, rather, sought to do something to save my planetary home while I was still young and while there was still time.

I should have possessed the cajones to become a radical activist who devoted his life, however short or long, to an attempt to stop the "progress" that I knew, even then, was poisoning the future home of my unborn children and grandchildren.

Such a course of action would have been more honorable, by far, than the teaching career I chose--one in which I whiled away my years seeking to please unimportant little pissant public school principals and superintendents.

D. Grant Haynes


 

Posted by DGrantHaynes at 10:15 PM | Link | 0 comments
02 January 2010
Haynes' other bully pulpit
Two blogs better than one...
Posted by DGrantHaynes at 11:00 PM | Link | 0 comments
01 January 2010
Who and What I Am
World of form transitory, illusory, at best


I am, in reality, a hyperspatial energy being whose forever home is the infinitude and grandeur of the multidimensional universe.

I temporarily inhabit--cast a shadow in--a dense physical shell in order that I may experience, learn and grow.

But I am not, ultimately, bounded by the so-called physical universe or by the apparent human condition.

These too shall pass, and I will retain my identity--remain consciously aware--whatever challenges may be mine at that point in my ongoing journey to the Light.

D. Grant Haynes

September 1997


Posted by DGrantHaynes at 8:00 PM | Link | 0 comments