Obamaville August 20 - Where did Obama go? Is he lost at Martha's Vineyard?

.

What a week in terms of politics.

Trump holds his first town hall and over 2,500 people show up.

Trump and Bush conduct dueling town halls.

Polls continue to show Trump overtaking Hillary.

Hillary holds pathetic news conference, reinforces her moral dilemma.

Clinton calls out the Big Dogs to deflect criticism of her email mess.

Clinton walks out of news conference accusing the news media of obsession with her trustworthiness.

The Huffington Post, still screaming for respect as a news organization rather than extension of the Bill Clinton good time group, refuses to treat Trump as news.

As Huffington declares Trump "entertainment" another liberal icon, Time Magazine, profiles Trump on the cover as revolutionizing presidential campaigns.

Obama's signature foreign policy achievement, a nuclear treaty with Iran that no one thinks will work, nears a vote, and may need a veto by Obama and arm twisting of Democrats to get approved.

Obama seems to have vanished on the golf courses of Martha's Vineyard demonstrating his continuing effort to prove he belongs among the rich and famous at the Cape, far from the unrest in the cities controlled by his fellow Democrats, like Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, and Ferguson.

Did I mention that the Obama economic recovery is teetering on the brink of another meltdown with the Internet stocks of companies he calls his friends are driving the markets down day after day.  Real economists say the entire Internet market is over-valued and due for a collapse.

With just 16 months left in the Obama presidency, his historical legacy is looking weaker and weaker as promise after promise from the president falls to the wayside.

At the same time, the Republicans seemed to have seized up, gone is the hope and promise of a new day post-Obama.  In fact, no professional politicians are saying anything about a bright future, only the non-politician Trump.

Inflation is up,

The economy is down,

Foreign governments do not trust us,

They have lost respect for our "super power" status,

GMOs continue taking over the world food supply,

Everyone and everything in the USA has been hacked by cyber crooks,

Serious crime is rising all over,

Health care costs rise as service falls,

None of the wealthy are in jail after destroying our economy,

Legal prescription drugs are causing more mass killings,

Yet, we are supposed to feel hope and happiness.
.

Obamaville July 28 - The Calm before the Storm - Dark Clouds on the Horizon

.

Campaign 2016

The clock keeps ticking with about 16 months left before the general election in November 2016 and already the political silly season has started.

The Republican candidates for president see nothing but Red and the Democratic candidates see nothing but Blue and I do not mean in terms of states on the election board.

Why is it the GOP gang of 16, 17, 18, or whatever cannot just leave Obama out of the election?  No one can change history and Obama did break a huge barrier when elected as our first African American president.  If he did nothing else, it was a significant historic achievement.

Many Americans did not approve of his agenda, his foreign policy, his intellectual indifference and other things but Obama is not going to be president any more.  American decency suggests the herd of candidates should focus on explaining what they would do as president, instead of threatening to tear down everything President Obama accomplished.

If I remember correctly, Obama got elected twice to serve as Commander and Chief of all the people and we owe our president respect if nothing else.  The GOP candidates seem incapable of giving us their agenda for the future choosing instead to mount goofy and demeaning attacks on every last thing the president says or does.

Of course, the National Republican Party just magnified the political partisanship when they limited the GOP debates to the top ten candidates leaving at least half a dozen out in the cold.  They could have had two debates of nine each to showcase all the candidates but no, that makes too much sense.

The only result was all the candidates turning up the volume and competing for who can make the most outrageous and incendiary sound bytes to the media in an effort to boost them into the top ten for the debate.

The GOP has no stranglehold on stupidity, however, as Hillary has flip flopped so many times already her Democratic base has no idea what she advocates.  She pleads she is a pauper with $200 million in the bank as she raises $2 billion for the campaign.  Duh...

Her wobbly and Pollyanna-like explanations for violating federal law by keeping top-secret files on her home computer, then erasing all the records before anyone could check her drive, may be one of the biggest blunders in presidential campaign history.  This was her election to lose and she is doing a very good job at it.

  

Running our Government

Now that the Republicans have control of both Houses of Congress, nothing has changed, much like Obama's first two years when the Democrats controlled both Houses.  It is a miracle when any little thing good happens in our nation's capitol and that is a very sorry state of affairs.

Campaign Finance Reform

The failure by Obama, the Democrats, the Republicans, and the presidential candidates to address campaign finance reform is tantamount to criminal neglect and insures the one to three percent of the people with all the wealth in America will continue to control our politicians like puppets on a string.

Foreign Policy Follies

The Obama administration foreign policy of negotiation with our enemies has resulted in a policy of appeasement and undermined whatever international credibility we might have had in the world.  Instead of a Super power, we are a Super wimp, and it may take generations to get past the morass.

Dark Economic Skies

After seven years of empty promises from Obama and both parties, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will still bankrupt our nation in time.  Our health care is the most expensive in the world and we still rank around nineteenth in terms of quality of service.

All the stock markets are the playground of the rich and pushed Joe six-pack out of the market with computers and crooks, crooks the Obama administration has failed to prosecute.  We still have a lot of corruption, discrimination, and even human trafficking, but we never miss a chance to blast other nations for their faults while ignoring our own.

International Terrorism

Terrorism thrives because of the foreign policy stupidity of both political parties.

Wish you voted different?

Economy

Our economy may very well be on life-support, as only the rich seem to have benefited from the economic recovery.  If the American public no longer has faith and trust in our many institutions it is for a very good reason, they do not deserve it.

Hope or a Dope

Still I have hope and remain optimistic that in the end the people will regain control of their government and force our politicians to fix the mess.

The Silent Majority

I never lose sight of the fact that when Obama won re-election in 2012 by the largest margin in his two campaigns, he still only won the overwhelming support of just twenty-six percent of the eligible voters in America.  An astonishing seventy-four percent of the eligible voters did not support him or his agenda.

One day all of our silent majority will finally register and vote and when they do all the money and professional politicians in the world will not be able to stop the tidal wave of reform the people will unleash on America.

.

Obamaville June 11 - Why do you stand alone in trying to be healthy - American Health Care does not Really Care

.

Well here is the answer why.

• Pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars when you are on prescription drugs.

• Local drug stores and pharmacies make money when you fill prescriptions.

• Obamacare makes sure you get subsidies and assistance if the drugs are too expensive.

• Big Pharma pays a kickback to your doctor for prescribing their drugs to you.

• The President and Congress refuse to change the law so you can get off the drugs.

• Where do all the kickbacks, over charges and over prescribed drug revenues go, to keep the politicians in office.

Call it what you like, there is no such thing as health care improvement in our system of health care.  Through doctors, clinics, and emergency rooms, drug companies treat your diseases and disorders with drugs that help manage the disease.

No one pays for you to get you well.

No one pays for a nutritional evaluation so you know the cause of the problem.

No one pays for proven herbal treatments used for nearly 5,000 years to eliminate the problem that caused the disease in the first place.

No one pays for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) treatment including herbs, acupuncture, physical training, and working knowledge of the Five Elements.

What is Traditional Chinese all about?  What are the five elements upon which it is built?

The Five Elements of TCM are a comprehensive template that organizes all natural phenomena into five master groups or patterns in nature. Each of the five groups—Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water—include categories such as a season, a direction, climate, stage of growth and development, internal organ, body tissue, emotion, aspect of the soul, taste, color, sound . . . the categories are seemingly limitless. The Five Elements reflect a deep understanding of natural law, the Universal order underlying all things in our world.

Traditional Chinese Medicine reflects a principle unknown in America, the principle of healing patients rather than maintaining and managing illness and disease.

Ironically, ignoring nearly 5,000 years of TCM experience, our health care system refuses to recognize the body of TCM work and refuses to make insurance companies pay to heal you using these techniques.

The same is true of other forms of natural health care through hundreds and even thousands of years of history including Native American medicine people, shamans and healers, indigenous people of many cultures, and folk medicine passed down through the generations.

Yet another body of ancient healing is the Celtic and Druid cultures and like the others, it is not recognized as legitimate by our medical, health, or insurance programs.

Finally, there is the outbreak of drug resistant diseases incluing eBola and others.  Here is what the FDA says about them.

FDA

Antibiotics and similar drugs, together called antimicrobial agents, have been used for the last 70 years to treat patients who have infectious diseases. Since the 1940s, these drugs have greatly reduced illness and death from infectious diseases. However, these drugs have been used so widely and for so long that the infectious organisms the antibiotics are designed to kill have adapted to them, making the drugs less effective.

Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections.

Maybe there is hope however.  Take the case of the use of a banned drug, cannabis, for medical purposes.  Over half the states in America have ignored the pressures from pharmaceutical companies to prohibit using marijuana to treat many illnesses.

These states have ignored the pressure from the politicians owned by these companies through campaign contributions and outrageous speaker fees.  The states have even ignored the federal government regulatory laws from the U.S. Justice Department and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by legalizing the use of the herb cannabis, better know as marijuana, for medicinal purposes.

That is a start toward meaningful health care reform.  You see, marijuana works, is not addictive, has never resulted in a death from an overdose, is substantially less expensive than Big Pharma drugs, and is not controlled by the richest corporations in America.

Of course, marijuana should be decriminalized; release the tens of thousands of people in prison for using it and save hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer costs.  It deserves approval nationwide for medicinal use and states should continue to approve it for recreational use since it has none of the deadly effects our legal drugs called alcohol and tobacco have wreaked on the public.

Far less controversial, and far more significant to improving health, would be to have the federal government require the insurance companies to pay for nutritional examines for all individuals and treatment for nutritional deficiencies.

At the same time, the federal government must approve the use of TCM by certified practitioners and order the insurance companies to cover it.

If the administration and congress can act in the public interest and do this, America will rapidly become a far healthier nation and lead the work in making use of all possible techniques to manage nutrition and get well.

Demand this action from your representatives in Washington, D.C. as they have demonstrated no ability to help you get well.

Hey dude, you know your fire truck is melting away.

You save some of that for me Bill!

Besides, for the first time in our history our last three presidents all admit to smoking marijuana.  It must not be that bad.

.