Details different, but con is same
With today's request by the Obama administration to extend the "Patriot Act," it's hard to see how this administration is any sort of "change" from the last one.
1. Escalation in Afghanistan as troops are sent there from Iraq instead of going home.
2. Special interest spending gone wild, first in February's "stimulus" bill loaded with pork and with the bailout of banks and other speculative institutions "too big to fail" - the continuation of the "United States of Goldman Sachs." Many fat corporate targets like ethanol and export subsidies are untouched.
3. No comprehensive tax reform. Instead, Congress is encouraged to tax the poor with a "fast food tax", a hike in gasoline taxes and with "cap and trade" legislation that will tax people through their electric companies that use coal-fired plants.
4. Health care with pharmacy companies and the American Medical Association writing the bill. Looks like we will get the worst of all possible worlds - no savings on doctors fees and drugs but care rationed by bureaucrats determining what treatment will be "too costly" for the elderly and the chronically sick.
5. Corruption as bad as Haliburton Cheney with a tax cheat as treasury secretary, etc. Michelle Malkin is right, "The Culture of Corruption" of Chicago politics has been moved to Washington, D.C.
6. The "racial healer," has fanned the flames with his outrageous attack on the Cambridge, Mass., police department in the Professor Gates affair. He has done nothing since to tamp down the tendency of his supporters to accuse any opponents of being "racist."
7. The continuous demonization and belittling of opponents.
This last point is the most alarming to me. As an opponent of the Iraq war and Bush's out-of-control spending, I hated the "Either you are with us or with the terrorists" rhetoric. The million people that showed up in Washington last Saturday, along with the millions who have attended other "Tea Parties" and local meetings with their congressman, are not "Nazis," "radical right racists," etc.
Yes, Joe Wilson shouldn't have interrupted Obama's speech, but it is also true that Democrats have repeatedly turned back attempts to stop illegal aliens from getting tax-funded health care or abortion funding in the proposed health care bill.
The administration has been lying about this as much as the last administration lied about "weapons of mass destruction."
It's really sad to see "progressives" get conned by Obama as badly as "conservatives" got conned by Bush.
It's time we realize the real enemy is the bipartisan "combine" in Washington, and stop re-electing all these incumbents who do little but line their own pockets and those of their cronies.
Don't let them fool you that some other big group of Americans is your biggest enemy only they can protect you from.
Grant D. Noble Lake Forest